Why Be Fake Quotes

Can’t hear… call back… good luck…” “Nïx, I know you’re faking the static.” She could picture her sister blowing into her fist directly at the receiver. The static abruptly stopped. “Why?” “It seemed less rude than the alternative.” “What’s that?” Click.

Live authentically. Why would you continue to compromise something that's beautiful to create something that is fake?

Of a band with three actual boys, why is it that all the maids lust after the fake one?

They're fake bullets, so why do I feel like Im bleeding out?

If you work in a hospital, you can’t easily fake call in sick to work. Oh, you’re sick? Well why don’t you come in to work and we’ll have a look at it.

Why would he appear to be so freaking concerned about me to my fake boyfriend anyway? she thought. He needs to mind his own business and keep out of mine. Shallow, arrogant bastard!

When I look at the fields, all I can see is how fake they are, how poor an imitation they are of the pictures of Sol-Earth fields. [...] And that's why I'll never be as good an Eldest as he is. Because I like a little chaos.

You told me this wasn't a formal date when you invited me to come. Why should I care if you have a girlfriend?" "Absolutely," he said, giving me a fake-serious look. "Yeah, you and I are just friends . . . out for a friendly walk. Nothing more, nothing less." "Exactly!" I agreed, my heart giving a painful twist. He broke into a large grin and, leaning over, kissed me on the cheek. "Kate," he whispered, "you are way too gullible.

Why didn't you guys dress up?" Lindsey asks. "We did." Calliope cracks her first smile. "we're dressed as twins." Lindsey grins back. "Hmm, I see it now. Fraternal or identical?" "You'd be surprised how many people ask," Cricket says. "What do you tell them?" Lindsey asks. "That I have a penis." Oh God. My cheeks burn as they all burst into laughter. Think about something else, Dolores. ANYTHING else. Cucumbers, Bananas, Zucchini. AHHHH! NO NO NO NO NO NO NO. I turn my face away from them as Calliope fakes a yakking sound.

It's all fake. Everyone is faking. Why does no one care about anything?

We can’t hide it or fake it. We’ll never fit society’s idea for how women should look and behave, but why is that a tragedy? We’re free to live how we want. It’s liberating, if you choose to see it that way.

Krista asks,"What is it about society that disappoints you so much?" Elliot thinks, "Oh I don't know, is it that we collectively thought Steve Jobs was a great man even when we knew he made billions off the backs of children? Or maybe it's that it feels like all our heroes are counterfeit; the world itself's just one big hoax. Spamming each other with our burning commentary of bullshit masquerading as insight, our social media faking as intimacy. Or is it that we voted for this? Not with our rigged elections, but with our things, our property, our money. I'm not saying anything new. We all know why we do this, not because Hunger Games books makes us happy but because we wanna be sedated. Because it's painful not to pretend, because we're cowards. Fuck Society." "Mr. Robot" season 1 episode 1, 'ohellofriend.mov

Well, well. If it isn't the princess." My body tensed and I frowned when I saw him approaching. Narrowing my eyes, I plastered on a fake smile. "I almost didn't recognize you without a tramp attached to you." Drew and the other guy snickered. Leaning into my ear he harshly whispered, "Would you like to change that? I'm not up to my limit tonight yet." Gah, why did he have to be so hot? My body was practically humming with how close he was. I leaned away and replied with the most innocent expression on my face, "Oh I'm sorry, but I don't have any STDs, I'm not your type.

Hey, don't you ever fake orgasms with me." She huffed. "I don't get why guys get so pissed when girls do that. Hell, your gender can fake an actual relationship.

"Nix, I know you're faking the static." She could picture her sister blowing into her fist directly at the receiver. The static abruptly stopped. "Why?" "It seamed less rude than the alternative." "What's that?" Click.

All real fantasy is serious. Only faked fantasy is not serious. That is why it is so wrong to impose faked fantasy on children....

Angeline's been hanging out with that dhampir. I just saw them walking off together. Is something going on with them?" "Which dhampir?" I asked. "The one with the fake British accent." "I don't think it's fake." "Well, whatever." Even I could read the jealousy in Trey's features. "What's up with them?" "Pretty sure there's nothing." "Then why are they always together?" Because she's trying to get over you, I thought.

Scout - oblivious to our jokes at her expense - pushed forward. "I don't understand why you're arguing with me. You know you have no chance." Michael clutched at his chest dramatically. "You're killing me, Scout. Really. There's chest pain - a tightness." He faked a groan.

why is it all so beautiful this fake dream this craziness why?

There is a law of the natural worlds (the spiritual and the physical) and this is something I have understood: that for every genuine existence, for every real manifestation and occurrence, there are are ten thousand falsities. Before you meet what or who is genuine, you will first have met, or known of, what is fake; and ten thousand times so! There is no need to feel disappointments, any number below ten thousand deceptions renders you a lucky person! And you ask why is there a need for this to happen? Well, if you have not known what is false first, there is no way to understand what then comes which is truth. What is lesser is so afraid of what is genuine, that it finds it necessary to imitate and duplicate that imitation ten thousand times over, for fear that you will finally meet what is real. The more important that one existence is, the more imitations there are in the world.

Next time, just give your enemy a smile, and he will wonder why?

I think you need to water your plants," Garrett [Swopes, PI]called out to me [Charley Davidson, Grim Reaper and PI]. "Oh, they're fake." He was looking at the plants I had along my windowsill. Either that or my mold problem was getting out of hand. After a long pause I heard, "Those are fake?" "Yeah, I had to make them look real. A little spray paint, a little lighter fluid, and voila! Fake dying plants." "Why would you want fake dying plants?" he asked. "Because if they were all thick and healthy-looking, anyone who knows me would realise they were fake." "Yeah, but is that really the point?" "Duh.

Why don't you and I have a nice penetrating man-to-man conversation?

I want fake love. But that's all I want, and that's why I can't have it.

A smile is the best way to get oneself out of a tight spot, even if it is a fake one. Surprisingly enough, everyone takes it at face value. I read that in a book." "If you keep staring at me, I'll hit you." "I only became part of your team recently when I replaced Sasuke, so I don't know everything that's going on. I don't really understand people either. But even I can tell that Naruto really loves you. Naruto's been shouldering that promise for a long time...I think he means to shoulder it for the rest of his life. I don't know what you said to him, but it's just like what's been done to me - it feels like a curse. Sasuke causes Naruto pain, but I think you do too." "Sasuke is only helping spread his darkness across the world. Letting him live will only sow the seeds of another war. He's just another criminal now. Sasuke lost all hope of coming back when his group, Akatsuki, attacked our village. Your fellow Konoha shinobi would never accept him now. Sakura's not stupid, either. She understands the position he's put us all in. That's why she came out here, to tell you herself.

Getting upset is like continuing the dream while you’re awake. The thing that provoked you wasn’t real—but your reaction was. And so from the fake comes real consequences. Which is why you need to wake up right now instead of creating a nightmare.

There is always magic to be summoned at any point. I love to live in a world of magic, but not a fake world of magic. We all really basically have a lot of magic... It’s only those of us who choose to accept it, that really understand it. It’s there for everyone. That’s the only thing that I feel I am able to give to people and that’s why I know that they respond to me because I try to give them only their own magic... not mine, but theirs

Half smiles were lazy. They were fake. Either smile with your fucking soul or don't bother. Probably why I hadn't smiled since I was six. My soul was dead.

I want to ask her again, why. Why is she friends with people who don’t let her be who she is? Who make her feel uncomfortable and embarrassed of who she is?

I want you to tell me about the Survivor," he finally said. "He was lord of the mists," Demoux said immediately. "Not the rhetoric," Elend said. "Someone tell me about the man, Kelsier. I never met him, you know. I saw him once, right before he died, but I never knew him." "What's the point?" Cett asked. "We've all heard the stories. He's practically a god, if you listen to the skaa." "Just do as I ask," Elend said. The tent was still for a few moments. Finally, Ham spoke. "Kell was . . . grand. He wasn't just a man, he was bigger than that. Everything he did was large—his dreams, the way he spoke, the way he thought. . . ." "And it wasn't false," Breeze added. "I can tell when a man is being a fake. That's why I started my first job with Kelsier, actually. Amidst all the pretenders and posturers, he was genuine. Everyone wanted to be the best. Kelsier really was." "He was a man," Vin said quietly. "Just a man. Yet, you always knew he'd succeed. He made you be what he wanted you to be." "So he could use you," Breeze said. "But you were better when he was done with you," Ham added

Hey, Arthur?” “Yes?” “Thank you for turning into a lunatic that one time, chasing a bunch of shoplifting teenagers through a rainstorm, and coming back to kiss me in the fake flower aisle at random. In retrospect, I really appreciate it.” “You’re welcome,” he says fondly.

I don’t wanna be in a fake-perfect-relationship. Because, however, it will eventually turn to be a shitty relationship. And why on earth, I would put myself inside a shitty and tiring relationship while there are probabilities and chances to have a real happy relationship out there?

Real people are actively trying to live like fake people, so real people are no less fake. Every comparison becomes impractical. This is why the impractical has become totally acceptable; impracticality almost seems cool.

And were you being good to yourself? i don’t think so. but, i forgive you, girl, who tallied stretch marks into reasons why no one should get close. i forgive you, silly girl, sweet breath, decent by default. i forgive you for being afraid. did everything betray you? even the rain you love so much made rust out of your jewelry? i forgive you, soft spoken girl speaking with fake brash voice, fooling no one. i see you, tender even on your hardest days. i forgive you, waiting for him to call, i forgive you, the diets and the cruel friends. especially for that one time you said ‘i fucking give up on love, it’s not worth it, i’d rather be alone forever’. you were just pretending, weren’t you? i know you didn’t mean that. your body, your mouth, your heart, made specifically for loving. sometimes the things we love, will kill us, but weren’t we dying anyway? i forgive you for being something that will eventually die. perishable goods, fading out slowly, little human, i wouldn’t want to be in a world where you don’t exist.

I feel sorry for people who maintain relationships and friendships detrimental to their mental health. Everyone is guilty of it at one time or another- but the idea is to strive to be your best; right? So, meanwhile why are so many people faking it? Security? Fear of loneliness? Fears of independence? Fears of being self ? Or just the idea that you can make someone change? Regardless of the justifications you give & treat yourself to... , I hope all of you - "new year -new me types" strive for self care , honest and pure friendships and relationships based of love- and not based off the fake realities of your mind. These delusions of what you hope for instead of what's there, where you and your puppet show master focus more on everyone else and less on self. To change the world you must start within. But you must first BE HONEST with yourself. My new year started a few months ago-- and it was the best choice I ever made- and I hope your recreations are progressive and successful in THE NEW YEAR

They're sending us fake notes. They're threatening our lives. Now, supposedly the of us, as Disney Hosts, represent some serious financials for the company. Why else would they install us on your ship? Give us a free cruise? We make them money: as guides, with merchandise, video games, books." "We're waiting for the movie," Finn added.

You called him a big dumb dodo?" Caroline asked later that night as the two of them sat on Jane's couch watching the gas fireplace lick the fake logs. "Why didn't you go for broke and call him a poo-poo head too?

I thought Oliver was trying hard before, but now I realize it's quite the opposite-- he doesn't try, he just is, makes up his mind and doesn't check if it's going to work for his image or come off wrong. Since the rest of us are being so self-aware, his presence seems calculated. No one can possibly be that breezy, saying what he thinks, feeling what he feels. I can see why people don't like him for this very reason-- it's so much easier to call him a poser. Because if he's the real deal, then that makes the rest of us fakes.

God told us to love everyone. However, when you don’t like someone then you need to walk away and focus not on him or her, but the hatred you’re harboring. Otherwise, you will allow your piety to take over. Before you know it, you’re using the gospel as a sword to slice other religious people apart, which have offended you. From your point of helplessness, it will be is easy to recruit people that will mistake your kindness as righteousness, when in reality it is a hidden agenda to humiliate through the words of Christ. This game is so often used by women in the Christian faith, that it is the number one reason why many people become inactive. It is a silent, unspoken hypocrisy that is inconsistent with the teachings of the gospel. If you choose not to like someone, then avoid them. If you wish to love them, the only way to overcome your frustrations is through empathy, prayer, forgiveness and allowing yourself time to heal through distance. Try focusing on what you share as sisters in the gospel, rather than the negative aspects you dislike about that person.

You can lead if you can serve. You can serve when you can love. You can love when you are graced. The truth is that God knows love will be needed in volumes, this is why he made his grace abundant. Leaders are lovers. Misleaders are haters!

How ... how fragile situations are. But not tenuous. Delicate, but not flimsy, not indulgent. Delicate, that's why they keep breaking, they must break and you must get the pieces together and show it before it breaks again, or put them aside for a moment when something else breaks and turn to that, and all this keeps going on. That's why most writing now, if you read it they go on one two three four and tell you what happened like newspaper accounts, no adjectives, no long sentences, no tricks they pretend, and they finally believe that they really believe that the way they saw it is the way it is ... it never takes your breath away, telling you things you already know, laying everything out flat, as though the terms and the time, and the nature and the movement of everything were secrets of the same magnitude. They write for people who read with the surface of their minds, people with reading habits that make the smallest demands on them, people brought up reading for facts, who know what's going to come next and want to know what's coming next, and get angry at surprises. Clarity's essential, and detail, no fake mysticism, the facts are bad enough. But we're embarrassed for people who tell too much, and tell it without surprise. How does he know what happened? unless it's one unshaven man alone in a boat, changing I to he, and how often do you get a man alone in a boat, in all this ... all this ... Listen, there are so many delicate fixtures, moving toward you, you'll see. Like a man going into a dark room, holding his hands down guarding his parts for fear of a table corner, and ... Why, all this around us is for people who can keep their balance only in the light, where they move as though nothing were fragile, nothing tempered by possibility, and all of a sudden bang! something breaks. Then you have to stop and put the pieces together again. But you never can put them back together quite the same way. You stop when you can and expose things, and leave them within reach, and others come on by themselves, and they break, and even then you may put the pieces aside just out of reach until you can bring them back and show them, put together slightly different, maybe a little more enduring, until you've broken it and picked up the pieces enough times, and you have the whole thing in all its dimensions. But the discipline, the detail, it's just ... sometimes the accumulation is too much to bear.

Confidence doesn't come from the inside out. It moves from the outside in. People feel less anxious--and more confident--on the inside when they can point to things they have done well on the outside. Fake confidence comes from stuffing our self-doubt. Empty confidence comes from parental platitudes on our lunch hour. Real confidence comes from mastery experiences, which are actual, lived moments of success, especially when things seem difficult. Whether we are talking about love or work, the confidence that overrides insecurity comes from experience. There is no other way.

I cannot do anything fake; that is why even when I sleep with a prostitute, she falls in love with me.

It could always all be unreal - how could you ever tell otherwise? You took it on trust, in part because what would be the point of doing anything else? When the fake behaved exactly like the real, why treat it as anything different? You gave it the benefit of the doubt, until something proved otherwise.

Angeline’s gaze swiveled to Zoe. “Why didn’t you have us pick up something?” “Because that’s not my job!” Zoe lifted her head up high. “We’re here to keep Jill’s cover and make sure she stays off the radar. It’s not my job to feed you guys.” “In which sense?” I asked. I knew perfectly well that was a mean thing to say to her but couldn’t resist. It took her a moment to pick up the double meaning. First she paled; then she turned an angry red. “Neither! I’m not your concierge. Neither is Sydney. I don’t know why she always takes care of that stuff for you. She should only be dealing with things that are essential for your survival. Ordering pizza isn’t one of them.” I faked a yawn and leaned back into the couch. “Maybe she figures if we’re well fed, you two won’t look that appetizing.” Zoe was too horrified to respond, and Eddie shot me a withering look.

One of the greatest glories of growing older is the willingness to ask why and, getting no good answer, deciding to follow my own inclinations and desires. Asking why is the way to wisdom. Why are we supposed to want possessions we don't need and work that seems beside the point and tight shoes and a fake tan? Why are we supposed to think new is better than old, youth and vigor better than long life and experience? Why are we supposed to turn our backs on those who have preceded us and to snipe at those who come after? When we were small children we asked 'Why?' constantly. Asking the question now is more a matter of testing the limits of what sometimes seems a narrow world. One of the useful things about age is realizing conventional wisdom is often simply inertia with a candy coating conformity.

We have to ask ourselves why we are so focused on silent girly-girls in G-strings faking lust. This is not a sign of progress, it's a testament to what's still missing from our understanding of human sexuality with all its complexity and power. We are still so uneasy with the vicissitudes of sex we need to surround ourselves with caricatures of female hotness to safely conjure up the concept of 'sexy.' When you think about it, it's kind of pathetic.

What was the good of acting out fake stories? Why not go live a few stories of your own?

The only difference between being uninformed and misinformed is that one is your choice and the other is theirs.

Nobody likes me,” he concluded at the tail end of a ten-minute pity fest. “Can’t imagine why,” Quinn murmured. I turned my snort of laughter into a fake cough, which was an embarrassingly feeble attempt at subterfuge when you consider the fact that I didn’t have any lungs.

Anyway, why would I want friends I had to act fake in front of? I don’t want to pretend to be scared of dead things and to prefer digital to film. I don’t mind that I’m old-fashioned.

There are people who cannot say good-bye They are born this way/this is how they die They are the keepers of promises/what moves them does not wear out Their loyalty will tear apart your clocks These are the people who can hear the music in songs They are the Vow carriers The grandmothers who always leave the porchlight on No one is lost to the one who sees These are the women widowed by men they never married These are the girls who wait even when you don't come These are the mothers of orphans/They can turn a fake into an original They will hear the prayer in your self-contempt As distance is measured/people do not end It is one of those stories that cannot be written down except across a lifetime of open doors There is a holding on beyond the letting go There is a reunion in everybody's chest This is how we come to make a family from strangers This is how we light candles These are people who will remember you when you meet them These are the people you can always call at night They are humans turned angels by your asking With each separation they go to seed again. These are the men who carried you on their shoulders This is the one your are lonely for the one who begins and ends your hunger This is the man who said "Always" There is something that does not wear out It is the third part of any two people who join It opens and closes There are people who are alone who are not apart This is why we listen to the madman when he speaks People change but they do not stop This is how we learn "Forever" There are people you can count on/They are the keepers of promises They are candles lit from each other They can teach us eternity We can get what we can give/This is the instruction There are people who do not say goodbye As distance is measured You are one of them

You told me, just now, just today, that you'd rather be dead than have to go through this much longer. I take that seriously. I don't think your suffering is fake. I don’t think these feelings about wanting it to end are fake. I don’t think your self-hatred is fake. So why do you think it’s fake?

And here’s an example of deliberate violation of a Fake Rule:   Fake Rule: The generic pronoun in English is he. Violation: “Each one in turn reads their piece aloud.”   This is wrong, say the grammar bullies, because each one, each person is a singular noun and their is a plural pronoun. But Shakespeare used their with words such as everybody, anybody, a person, and so we all do when we’re talking. (“It’s enough to drive anyone out of their senses,” said George Bernard Shaw.) The grammarians started telling us it was incorrect along in the sixteenth or seventeenth century. That was when they also declared that the pronoun he includes both sexes, as in “If a person needs an abortion, he should be required to tell his parents.” My use of their is socially motivated and, if you like, politically correct: a deliberate response to the socially and politically significant banning of our genderless pronoun by language legislators enforcing the notion that the male sex is the only one that counts. I consistently break a rule I consider to be not only fake but pernicious. I know what I’m doing and why.

Since we don’t have a body to confirm identity, we believe Nathan Drake is alive and threatening people, which means he faked his own death. (Josie) And maybe fat flying fairies ate the rest of your blouse, which explains why so much of it’s missing. (Terri)

O woman, father says natural is beautiful so why do you redden your cheeks and blacken your eyes? Why do you remove the hair on your legs and draw them into your brows? Why do you hold your breath lest your stomach show and hold your fart lest they know that you’re a human? O woman, father says natural is beautiful so why do you straighten your hair to curl it next and pretend to orgasm so they think you enjoyed the sex? Why do you dumb yourself down and push your breasts up? Why do you smile when you’re told to and love when you don’t want to? When? When will you stop, woman? Father says natural is beautiful but that is doubtful for what does father know he’s only a fellow.

Maybe you know something about young people, and maybe you don't. I, having been one myself once upon a time, know a few things about them. One thing I know is that if you don't want one to do something - for example, go into a room where there's a portrait of an unbearably beautiful princess- saying "It might cost you your life" is about the worst thing you can possibly say. Because then that's all that young person will want to do. I mean, why didn't Johannes say something else? Like, "It's a broom closet. Why? you want to see a broom closet?" Or, "It's a fake door, silly. For decoration." Or even, "It's the ladies' bathroom, Your Majesty. Best not go poking your head in there.

The simple fact of the matter is that trying to be perfectly likable is incompatible with loving relationships. Sooner or later, for example, you’re going to find yourself in a hideous, screaming fight, and you’ll hear coming out of your mouth things that you yourself don’t like at all, things that shatter your self-image as a fair, kind, cool, attractive, in-control, funny, likable person. Something realer than likability has come out in you, and suddenly you’re having an actual life. Suddenly there’s a real choice to be made, not a fake consumer choice between a BlackBerry and an iPhone, but a question: Do I love this person? And, for the other person, does this person love me? There is no such thing as a person whose real self you like every particle of. This is why a world of liking is ultimately a lie. But there is such a thing as a person whose real self you love every particle of. And this is why love is such an existential threat to the techno-consumerist order: it exposes the lie.

Oh,Mercer," he murmured against my temple once we'd come up for air, "we are so screwed." I pressed my face against his neck, breathing him in. "I know." "So what do we do?" Reluctantly, I tried to move away. It was hard to think when he was so close to me. "If we were good people, we'd never see each other again." His arms locked around my waist, pulling me back. "Okay,well, that's not happening. Plan B?" I smiled up at him, feeling ridiculously giddy for someone on the verge of ruining her life. "I don't have one.You?" He shook his head. "Nothing.But...look. I've spent basically my whole life pretending to be someone I'm not, faking some feelings, hiding others." Reaching down, he clasped my hand and lifted it so that our joined hands were trapped between our chests. "This thing with us is the only real thing I've had in a long time.You're the only real thing." He raised our hands and kissed my knuckles. "And I'm done pretending I don't want you." I had read a lot about swooning in the romance novels Mom had tried to hide from me,but I'd never felt in danger of doing it until now. Which was why a snarky comment was definitely called for. "Wow,Cross.I think you missed your calling.Screw demon hunting: you should clearly be writing Hallmark cards." His face broke into that crooked grin that was maybe my favorite sight in the whole world. "Shut up," he muttered before lowering his head and kissing me again. "Why is it," I said against his lips several moments later, "that we're always kissing in gross, dirty places like cellars and abandoned mills?" He laughed, pressing kisses to my jaw, then my neck. "Next time it'll be a castle, I promise.This is England, after all. Can't be too hard to find one.

The most spiritual people I’ve ever met were not “givers” they were communicators. You don’t give people crumbs. You give them the whole piece of bread when that is what they are asking for, in order to be healed. Christ was never about hiding behind a Facebook page, an email, a prayer circle, a bible, or a church. He was about talking, listening and healing-- face to face. He walked among sinners and ate with them. He devoted his time to people that were brokenhearted, difficult to like and fake as the religious beliefs they clung to. So, why is it that so many people profess to believe in Christ, yet they have forgotten what real love is----communicating?

Oh, I’m not allowed to take art classes anymore,” Cricket said with a kind of carelessness he was pretty sure she was faking. “You can proooooobably guess why.” “Good heavens, Cricket,” he said, putting on the voice she’d used several times already. “No one has ever used that many colors on one piece of paper before. Look at this mess. Why can’t you just draw a normal blue blueberry like every other dragon?

My guest to dinner was my best friend, Jocelyn, who had taken the train down from New York. We forewent seeing any DC museums or national monuments to order cheeseburgers and watch Will & Grace in bed at our hotel, because we are real best friends, not lame fake friends trying to impress each other with how fascinated we are with culture and learning.

Why I am Passionate and Dedicated 1000% to producing and bringing my books Loving Summer, Bitter Frost, and other book series to the Screen is because these are the very books that I was cyber-bullied on. When confronted by bullies, you don't shy away, but you Fight Back. Many people have not read the books, but believe fake news and damaging slanders against them and me as a person because it was a marketing strategy used to sell my books' rival books. By bringing these very books to the screen, people can see how different my books are to theirs. Also, most of all, it is pretty darn fun and fierce for me, as a female Asian writer, director, and producer to bring these fan favorite books to screen.

So many of us hide from ourselves and we don't even know who we are and why were we here? All peoples will prove they are better and put fake masks on their own faces. Every people pretend herself what they actually not from inside. Afraid to show the reality and hide their best quality. You just have to learn to be yourself and what really makes you happy, or other things that are not important and what others think of you is not important at all.

I don't know why, but I didn't want her to call me Dick anymore. It was feeling kind of fake. 'Maybe we should use our real names outside of class. Yours is Rosetta, right?' 'Yes. Rosetta Vaughn.' 'All right,' I said. 'Well, mine is - ' 'Seth McCoy. I know.' She kind of wrapped her arms around herself like she was getting cold. 'I've known since February fourteenth, actually.' She's memorized the date she found out my name? What the hell? She laughed. 'Don't freak out! I only remember because it was Valentine's Day.' As if that explained it. 'And why do you remember learning my name on Valentine's Day?' 'Kendall Eckman was running after you in the hall screaming, "Seth McCoy, if you don't buy a rose from me, I'll kill you!" She was doing that Valentine's drama club fundraiser. Remember?' 'Actually, yes.' What I remembered was getting stoned with Isaac before school, and Kendall harshing my mellow the minute we walked in the door. Rosetta was looking like there was more to this story. 'And after she kept asking, you bought a red one?' 'Right. And I passed it off to -' I'd been about to say 'some chick,' but with how intently she was watching me, I was getting a different idea. '-you, right?' She extended her arm to pass me an imaginary rose in the same way I must have handed her a real one. Then she imitated the corny voice I must have used. 'Here, beautiful. Have a wonderful Valentine's Day.' Oh, Christ. The stupid shit I said sometimes.

Doctors tend to enter the arenas of their profession's practice with a brisk good cheer that they have to then stop and try to mute a bit when the arena they're entering is a hospital's fifth floor, a psych ward, where brisk good cheer would amount to a kind of gloating. This is why doctors on psych wards so often wear a vaguely fake frown of puzzled concentration, if and when you see them in fifth-floor halls. And this is why a hospital M.D.--who's usually hale and pink-cheeked and poreless, and who almost always smells unusually clean and good--approaches any psych patient under this care with a professional manner somewhere between bland and deep, a distant but sincere concern that's divided evenly between the patient's subjective discomfort and the hard facts of the case.

Without deception, sexual attraction isn’t possible. Men deceive women in many ways, and women deceive men on a whole different, god-like level. It’s not just makeup. It’s something far much greater. Many women try to play dumb, lest the man get scared of their intellectual abilities. Many women fake flexibility when it comes to opinions, as they know many men aren’t accepting of a highly opinionated woman. It’s a multitude of things with women. Whereas with men, things are quite simple. They just have to portray that they are the most sorted out guys, will be good providers, and know what they are doing in their lives. Putting it in a nutshell, both men and women deceive each other. But after a few months of marriage, the veil of deception is lifted. The woman who once seemed timid suddenly begins to voice her concerns. The woman who once seemed flexible suddenly begins to assert her unpopular opinions and impose her will. Men disappoint too. The woman realizes her guy isn’t as sorted out as he pretended to be. All in all, only when people start living together do they come to know of their partners for real. No wonder why so many love marriages end up in divorce within a year.

COBB: What do you want from us? SAITO: Inception. Arthur raises his eyebrows. Cobb is poker-faced. SAITO: Is it possible? ARTHUR: Of course not. SAITO: If you can steal an idea from someone's mind, why can't you plant one there instead? ARTHUR: Okay, here's planting an idea: I say to you, "Don't think about elephants." (Saito nods) What are you thinking about? SAITO: Elephants. ARTHUR: Right. But it's not your idea because you know I gave it to you. SAITO: You could plant it subconsciously- ARTHUR: The subject's mind can always trace the genesis of the idea. True inspiration is impossible to fake. COBB: No, it isn't. SAITO: Can you do it? COBB: I won't do it. SAITO: In exchange, I'll give you the information you were paid to steal. COBB: Are you giving me a choice? Because I can find my own way to square things with Cobol. SAITO: Then you do have a choice. COBB: And I choose to leave.

How can so many (white, male) writers narratively justify restricting the agency of their female characters on the grounds of sexism = authenticity while simultaneously writing male characters with conveniently modern values? The habit of authors writing Sexism Without Sexists in genre novels is seemingly pathological. Women are stuffed in the fridge under cover of "authenticity" by secondary characters and villains because too many authors flinch from the "authenticity" of sexist male protagonists. Which means the yardstick for "authenticity" in such novels almost always ends up being "how much do the women suffer", instead of - as might also be the case - "how sexist are the heroes". And this bugs me; because if authors can stretch their imaginations far enough to envisage the presence of modern-minded men in the fake Middle Ages, then why can't they stretch them that little bit further to put in modern-minded women, or modern-minded social values? It strikes me as being extremely convenient that the one universally permitted exception to this species of "authenticity" is one that makes the male heroes look noble while still mandating that the women be downtrodden and in need of rescuing. -Comment at Staffer's Book Review 4/18/2012 to "Michael J. Sullivan on Character Agency

I am no scientist. I explore the neighborhood. An infant who has just learned to hold up his head has a frank and forthright way of gazing about him in bewilderment. He hasn’t the faintest clue where he is, and he aims to find out. In a couple of years, what he will have learned instead is how to fake it: he’ll have the cocksure air of a squatter who has come to feel he owns the place. Some unwonted, taught pride diverts us from our original intent, which is to explore the neighborhood, view the landscape, to discover at least where it is that we have been so startlingly set down, if we can’t learn why.

I actually do have a motto,” said Heat. “It’s ‘Never forget who you work for.'" And as she voiced the words, Nikki felt a creeping unease. It wasn’t exactly shame, but it was close. For the first time it sounded hollow. Fake. Why? She examined herself, trying to see what was different. The stress, that was new. And when she looked at that, she recognized that the hardest part of her day lately was working to avoid confrontation with Captain Montrose. That’s when it came to her. In that moment, sitting nearly naked in Rook’s living room, playing some silly nineteenth-century parlor game, she came to an unexpected insight. In that moment Nikki woke up and saw with great clarity who she had become - and who she had stopped being. Without noticing it, Heat had begun seeing herself as working for her captain and had lost sight of her guiding principle, that she worked for the victim.

So why were you with her?" "She was my assignment." "From The Eye?" "No,from the Boy Scouts. That Witch Dating badge just kept eluding me." "Well,you must have at least three Total Douchebag badges by now, so that has to count for something. What about Holly? Was that fake,too?" I was panting slightly, thanks to trying to keep up with him. Stupid short legs. He had his hands in his pockets, and hi head was slightly down, like he was walking against the wind. "You know, these were all things I was willing to tell you several weeks ago. Too bad you decided to stand me up." I had caught up to him by now, and I snagged his elbow,doing my best to ignore the little thrill that went through me even at that innocent touch. "How is that you can go from decent human being to complete jackass in zero-point-two seconds? Do they teach you that in The Eye?" He stopped, and his eyes glided over my lips. "Actually,I'm just trying to see if I can make you mad enough to kiss me again.

To the winter forest And nowhere to go This girl runs From all she knows The pressure rises to the top The pressure rises (it won't stop) They want your body They want your soul They want fake smiles That's rock and roll The wolves surrond you A fever dream The wolves surrond you So start the scream Howl, into the night, Howl, until the light, Howl, your turn to fight, Howl, just make it right Howl howl howl howl (Motherfucker) You can't fight fo ever You have to comply If your life isn't working You have to ask why Remember When we were young enough Not to fear tomorrow Or mourn yesterday And we were just Us And time was just Now And we were in Life Not rising through Like arms in a sleeve Because we had time We had time to breathe The bad times are here The bad times have come but life can't be over When it hasn't begun The lake shines and the water's cold All that glitters can turn to gold Silence the music to improve the tune Stop the fake smiles and howl at the moon Howl, into the night, Howl, until the light, Howl, your turn to fight, Howl, just make it right Howl howl howl howl

Doctors tend to enter the arenas of their profession’s practice with a brisk good cheer that they have to then stop and try to mute a bit when the arena they’re entering is a hospital’s fifth floor, a psych ward, where brisk good cheer would amount to a kind of gloating. This is why doctors on psych wards so often wear a vaguely fake frown of puzzled concentration, if and when you see them in fifth-floor halls.

When relationships have outlived their shelf life, people often realize that at some level, they are sticking it our because they once thought in the light of their divine love that the other person would change. Sorry for breaking the poetic hope here, but that doesn't happen. People are like rubber bands. They may be able to stretch from time to time and do some amazing things, but in general they are who they are. If manipulation and machinations on your side get them to behave the way you want, I will set my clock on the fact that they will return to their previous way of behaving, or they will keep faking it. To be in a relationship with someone who is not really there doesn't make sense. People who aren't cooperating feel like a project to us, like something for us to rescue or fix. Rescuing is the province of firefighters and fairy tales, but it's not real life. The stance of sticking it out in hopes of redemption is an old story and one that has wasted many lives.

I smack into him as if shoved from behind. He doesn't budge, not an inch. Just holds my shoulders and waits. Maybe he's waiting for me to find my balance. Maybe he's waiting for me to gather my pride. I hope he's got all day. I hear people passing on the boardwalk and imagine them staring. Best-case scenario, they think I know this guy, that we're hugging. Worst-case scenario, they saw me totter like an intoxicated walrus into this complete stranger because I was looking down for a place to park our beach stuff. Either way, he knows what happened. He knows why my cheek is plastered to his bare chest. And there is definite humiliation waiting when I get around to looking up at him. Options skim through my head like a flip book. Option One: Run away as fast as my dollar-store flip flops can take me. Thing is, tripping over them is partly responsible for my current dilemma. In fact, one of them is missing, probably caught in a crack of the boardwalk. I'm getting Cinderella didn't feel this foolish, but then again, Cinderella wasn't as clumsy as an intoxicated walrus. Option two: Pretend I've fainted. Go limp and everything. Drool, even. But I know this won't work because my eyes flutter too much to fake it, and besides, people don't blush while unconscious. Option Three: Pray for a lightning bolt. A deadly one that you feel in advance because the air gets all atingle and your skin crawls-or so the science books say. It might kill us both, but really, he should have been paying more attention to me when he saw that I wasn't paying attention at all. For a shaved second, I think my prayers are answered because I go get tingly all over; goose bumps sprout everywhere, and my pulse feels like electricity. Then I realize, it's coming from my shoulders. From his hands. Option Last: For the love of God, peel my cheek off his chest and apologize for the casual assault. Then hobble away on my one flip-flop before I faint. With my luck, the lightning would only maim me, and he would feel obligated to carry me somewhere anyway. Also, do it now. I ease away from him and peer up. The fire on my cheeks has nothing to do with the fact that it's sweaty-eight degrees in the Florida sun and everything to do with the fact that I just tripped into the most attractive guy on the planet. Fan-flipping-tastic. "Are-are you all right?" he says, incredulous. I think I can see the shape of my cheek indented on his chest. I nod. "I'm fine. I'm used to it. Sorry." I shrug off his hands when he doesn't let go. The tingling stays behind, as if he left some of himself on me. "Jeez, Emma, are you okay?" Chloe calls from behind. The calm fwopping of my best friend's sandals suggests she's not as concerned as she sounds. Track star that she is, she would already be at my side if she thought I was hurt. I groan and face her, not surprised that she's grinning wide as the equator. She holds out my flip-flop, which I try not to snatch from her hand. "I'm fine. Everybody's fine," I say. I turn back to the guy, who seems to get more gorgeous by the second. "You're fine, right? No broken bones or anything?" He blinks, gives a slight nod. Chloe setts her surfboard against the rail of the boardwalk and extends her hand to him. He accepts it without taking his eyes off me. "I'm Chloe and this is Emma," she says. "We usually bring her helmet with us, but we left it back in the hotel room this time.

The most universal expression of all is a smile, which is rather a nice thought. No society has ever been found that doesn’t respond to smiles in the same way. True smiles are brief—between two-thirds of a second and four seconds. That’s why a held smile begins to look menacing. A true smile is the one expression that we cannot fake. As the French anatomist G.-B. Duchenne de Boulogne noticed as long ago as 1862, a genuine, spontaneous smile involves the contraction of the orbicularis oculi muscle in each eye, and we have no independent control over those muscles. You can make your mouth smile, but you can’t make your eyes sparkle with feigned joy.

These are lines from my asteroid-impact novel, Regolith: Just because there are no laws against stupidity doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be punished. I haven’t faced rejection this brutal since I was single. He smelled trouble like a fart in the shower. If this was a kiss of gratitude, then she must have been very grateful. Not since Bush and Cheney have so few spent so much so fast for so long for so little. As a nympho for mind-fucks, Lisa took to politics like a pig to mud. She began paying men compliments as if she expected a receipt. Like the Aerosmith song, his get-up-and-go just got-up-and-went. “You couldn’t beat the crap out of a dirty diaper!” He embraced his only daughter as if she was deploying to Iraq. She was hotter than a Class 4 solar flare! If sex was a weapon, then Monique possessed WMD I haven’t felt this alive since I lost my virginity. He once read that 95% of women fake organism, and the rest are gay. Beauty may be in the eyes of the beholder, but ugly is universal. Why do wives fart, but not girlfriends? Adultery is sex that is wrong, but not necessarily bad. The dinosaurs stayed drugged out, drooling like Jonas Brothers fans. Silence filled the room like tear gas. The told him a fraction of the truth and hoped it would take just a fraction of the time. Happiness is the best cosmetic, He was a whale of a catch, and there were a lot of fish in the sea eager to nibble on his bait. Cheap hookers are less buck for the bang, Men cannot fall in love with women they don’t find attractive, and women cannot fall in love with men they do not respect. During sex, men want feedback while women expect mind-reading. Cooper looked like a cow about to be tipped over. His father warned him to never do anything he couldn’t justify on Oprah. The poor are not free -- they’re just not enslaved. Only those with money are free. Sperm wasn’t something he would choose on a menu, but it still tasted better than asparagus. The crater looked alive, like Godzilla was about to leap out and mess up Tokyo. Bush follows the Bible until it gets to Jesus. When Bush talks to God, it’s prayer; when God talks to Bush, it’s policy. Cheney called the new Miss America a traitor – apparently she wished for world peace. Cheney was so unpopular that Bush almost replaced him when running for re-election, changing his campaign slogan to, ‘Ain’t Got Dick.’ Bush fought a war on poverty – and the poor lost. Bush thinks we should strengthen the dollar by making it two-ply. Hurricane Katrina got rid of so many Democratic voters that Republicans have started calling her Kathleen Harris. America and Iraq fought a war and Iran won. Bush hasn’t choked this much since his last pretzel. Some wars are unpopular; the rest are victorious. So many conservatives hate the GOP that they are thinking of changing their name to the Dixie Chicks. If Saddam had any WMD, he would have used them when we invaded. If Bush had any brains, he would have used them when we invaded. It’s hard for Bush to win hearts and minds since he has neither. In Iraq, you are a coward if you leave and a fool if you stay. Bush believes it’s not a sin to kill Muslims since they are going to Hell anyway. And, with Bush’s help, soon. In Iraq, those who make their constitution subservient to their religion are called Muslims. In America they’re called Republicans. With great power comes great responsibility – unless you’re Republican.

A life coach? What does that mean? It doesn’t mean anything, does it? So they ‘coach’ people on how to live their lives? Why don’t they mind their own fucking business? They only call themselves life coaches because they can’t get a job. Because they’re unemployable. And they haven’t got any qualifications either. Do you think they went to Uni to study life coaching? Of course they didn’t. And who do they coach anyway? Do people go to them and ask to be coached on their lives? I hardly think so. They’d see a psychiatrist or a psychologist or someone with a bit of clout, wouldn’t they? They don’t coach anybody at all, do they? They’ve made it all up. So, there you have it. At the bottom end of the otherworldly, metaphysical scale, even less developed spiritually than Orphans or Horace, are Life Coaches.

So I looked with fascination at those people in their mobes, and tried to fathom what it would be like. Thousands of years ago, the work that people did had been broken down into jobs that were the same every day, in organizations where people were interchangeable parts. All of the story had been bled out of their lives. That was how it had to be; it was how you got a productive economy. But it would be easy to see a will at work behind this: not exactly an evil will, but a selfish will. The people who'd made the system thus were jealous, not of money and not of power but of story. If their employees came home at day's end with interesting stories to tell, it meant that something had gone wrong: a blackout, a strike, a spree killing. The Powers That Be would not suffer others to be in stories of their own unless they were fake stories that had been made up to motivate them. People who couldn't live without story had been driven into the concents or into jobs like Yul's. All others had to look somewhere outside of work for a feeling that they were part of a story, which I guessed was why Sæculars were so concerned with sports, and with religion. How else could you see yourself as part of an adventure? Something with a beginning, middle, and end in which you played a significant part? We avout had it ready-made because we were a part of this project of learning new things. Even if it didn't always move fast enough for people like Jesry, it did move. You could tell where you were and what you were doing in that story. Yul got all of this for free by living his stories from day to day, and the only drawback was that the world held his stories to be of small account. Perhaps that was why he felt such a compulsion to tell them, not just about his own exploits in the wilderness, but those of his mentors.

For as Molly looked at him, she felt an immediate … she didn’t know what. Despite her love of the language arts, she also possessed an analytic mind, and that mind straightaway tried to seek out the why. And it couldn’t unearth the reason apart from his smile. Or, rather, how he smiled at her—warm and full-armed, like the embrace from a long-absent friend, without the slightest trace of fakeness or concealed motive. His was the most open face she’d ever seen in her life. Concomitant with these sensations, all delivered within a split second, was a thought, seemingly originating not in her mind but from the center of her torso and radiating out to the ends of each nerve, inexplicable in its suddenness and surety. A thought that children and very young people might have, but never middle-aged adults, especially one with a divorce behind her and the conviction that she already knew the world and what it was able to offer. But there it was, undeniably, the thought: I’m on a great adventure.

That red-headed man thought she was a fraud! ‘Making assumptions about others is rude,’ Kusha read in Learn Basic Manners. Not making assumptions is a basic manner. Why would a High Grade—a war hero, the King of Mesmerizers—not know the basic manners? How does she make such a dreadful first-impression, though? For the first time in her life, in her current memory, Kusha knows how it feels to be misunderstood by a stranger. Especially if you know the stranger so well from afar, you admire his voice, you collect his speeches, you even own all the books he wrote and all the cheap fakes of the paintings he rarely drew. “First impression matters, sweetie. Letting people see who you are matters. Better tell the truth than a lie. And the worst is a lie that they assume from your actions, sweetie …” Kusha closes her eyes, attempting to shut off Meera’s voice.

I whispered, "Do you have a rubber?" He laughed, hushed, a laughing whisper, as though his parents were in the next room, and reached one arm past my head to a nightstand there. "A rubber chicken." He shook the dancing chicken in the air. "Will that do?" I laughed back, ran a finger along the bumps of the fake chicken skin. "Ribbed and beaked for her pleasure, even. Want me to leave you two alone?" He threw the chicken on the floor and bit my neck and I giggled and he said, "Never," and he was everywhere then. The couch was a sinking place and I disappeared into the orgy of costumes, the smell of nervous strangers, makeup and smoke, my naked body buried in the perfume of human need. I took the rubber chicken home. Plucky was my mascot, the souvenir of our date. Later, much later, there was the conception of our child. And now the miscarriage, unexpected, though I should've expected it because, why not? -- family slid through my fingers the same as the old silicone banana-peel trick. After the D&C, after the suctioning away of our tiny fetus, I drew the black heart on Plucky's rubber breast in the place where a chicken might have a heart, over the ridges of implied feathers. Indelible ink. Now she'd been nabbed by a kid too young to know what love means, what a chicken might mean. Too young to know that a rubber chicken can carry all of love in one indelible ink heart.

The obsession with seeking in Africa's colonial past the causes of all its miseries today is the work of people intimately convinced that Africa is doomed, that it is unable to take care of itself today, and that, finally, the fate of the Black will only improve if the White comes back to repair what he has done wrong: these “hidden Afro- pessimists “ are hiding, under gratuitous accusations, anger, or demand for reparation, their own disarray. This explains why their words are sterile, never accompanied by proposals for solutions to the problems they evoke. They are doing a lot of harm to Africa because they divert issues that have worth.

Oh, I don't know. Is it that we collectively thought Steve Jobs was a great man, even when we knew he made billions off the backs of children? Or maybe it's that it feels like all our heroes are counterfeit? The world itself's just one big hoax. Spamming each other with our running commentary of bulls**t, masquerading as insight, our social media faking as intimacy. Or is it that we voted for this? Not with our rigged elections, but with our things, our property, our money. I'm not saying anything new. We all know why we do this, not because Hunger Games books makes us happy, but because we wanna be sedated. Because it's painful not to pretend, because we're cowards.

When Vivian describes how it felt to be at the mercy of strangers, Molly nods. She knows full well what it’s like to tamp down your natural inclinations, to force a smile when you feel numb. After a while you don’t know what your own needs are anymore. You’re grateful for the slightest hint of kindness, and then, as you get older, suspicious. Why would anyone do anything for you without expecting something in return? And anyway—most of the time they don’t. More often than not, you see the worst of people. You learn that most adults lie. That most people only look out for themselves. That you are only as interesting as you are useful to someone. And so your personality is shaped. You know too much, and this knowledge makes you wary. You grow fearful and mistrustful. The expression of emotion does not come naturally, so you learn to fake it. To pretend. To display an empathy you don’t actually feel. And so it is that you learn how to pass, if you’re lucky, to look like everyone else, even though you’re broken inside.

Jace," said Simon as Jace watched Clary and smiled. Jace glanced at him and looked annoyed. "Remember when you told me that you wished I could remember?" "Why are you asking me if I remember things?" Jace asked, sounding definitely annoyed. "I'm not the one who has problems with remembering. Remember?" "I just wondered what you meant by that." Simon waited, giving Jace a chance to take advantage of his demon amnesia and tell him another fake secret. Instead, Jace looked incredibly uncomfortable. "Nothing," he said. "What would I mean? Nothing." "Did you just mean you wanted me to remember the past generally?" Simon asked. "So I'd remember all the adventures we had and the manly bonds we formed together?" Jace continued to make an uncomfortable face. Simon remembered Alec saying Jace was so upset. "Wait, was that actually it?" Simon asked incredulously. "Did you miss me?" "Obviously not!" snapped Jace. "I would never miss you. I, um, was talking about something specific." "Okay. So, what specific thing did you want me to recall?" Simon asked. He eyed Jace suspiciously. "Was it the biting?" "No!" said Jace. "Was that a special moment for you?" Simon asked. "One that you wanted me to remember that we shared?" "Remember this moment," said Jace. "At the very next opportunity that offers, I am going to leave you to die at the bottom of an evil boat. I want you to remember why." Simon smiled to himself. "No, you won't. You would never leave me to die at the bottom of an evil boat," he muttered as Alec strolled over to the slanted sofa and Jace looked outraged by what he was hearing.

So you and St. Clair seemed pretty friendly at breakfast." "Um." Is she threatened by me? "I wouldn't get any ideas if I were you," she continues. "Not even you're pretty enough to steal him from his girlfriend. They've been together forever." Was that a compliment? Or not? Her emphasizing is really getting on my nerves. (My nerves.) Amanda gives a fake, bored yawn. "Interesting hair." I touch it self-consciously. "Thanks. My friend bleached it." Bridge added the thick band to my dark brown hair just last week. Normally, I keep the stripe tucked behind my right ear, but tonight it's back in a ponytail. "Do you like it?" she asks. Universal bitch-speak for I think it's hideous. I drop my hand. "Yeah.That's why I did it." "You know,I wouldn't pull it back like that. You kinda look like a skunk." "At least she doesn't reek like one." Rashmi appears behind me. She'd been visiting Meredith; I'd heard their muffled voices through my walls. "Delightful perfume, Amanda. Use a little more next time. I don't know if they can smell you in London.

You measure a good song the same way you measure architecture, fashion, or any other artistic endeavor. Time. You know when you see a picture of yourself from the eighties with a horrible hairdo and some stone-washed jeans and you think, “How embarrassing—what the fuck was I thinking? Why didn’t somebody stop me?” It’s the same thing Mick Jagger and David Bowie should be thinking every time they hear their cover of “Dancing in the Streets.” The point is, at the time it seemed like a good idea, just like kitchens with burnt-orange Formica and avocado appliances, den walls covered with fake brick paneling, and segregation—all horrible decisions that we now universally recognize as wrong. But somehow when it comes to music, we can’t just admit we made a mistake with “Emotional Rescue.” There’s always some dick who defends the past. “Hey, man, I lost my virginity to ‘Careless Whisper.’ ” I’m sure there was somebody who got laid for the first time on 9/11 but they don’t get a boner when they see the footage of the planes going into the tower.

The tourists had money and we needed it; they only asked in return to be lied to and deceived and told that single most important thing, that they were safe, that their sense of security—national, individual, spiritual—wasn’t a bad joke being played on them by a bored and capricious destiny. To be told that there was no connection between then and now, that they didn't need to wear a black armband or have a bad conscience about their power and their wealth and everybody else’s lack of it; to feel rotten that no-one could or would explain why the wealth of a few seemed so curiously dependent on the misery of the many. We kindly pretended that it was about buying and selling chairs, about them asking questions about price and heritage, and us replying in like manner. But it wasn’t about price and heritage, it wasn’t about that at all. The tourists had insistent, unspoken questions and we just had to answer as best we could, with forged furniture. They were really asking, 'Are we safe?' and we were really replying, 'No, but a barricade of useless goods may help block the view.' And because hubris is not just an ancient Greek word but a human sense so deep-seated we might better regard it as an unerring instinct, they were also wanting to know, 'If it is our fault, then will we suffer?' and we were really replying, 'Yes, and slowly, but a fake chair may make us both feel better about it.

The average person walks into their doctor's office ready to accept whatever is said and handed to them. Without taking time to research or gain more insight, they accept pills and treatment without looking into other options. Our nation overeats. We put toxic fake food into our bodies, but wonder why we're sick. We continue a vicious cycle of consuming the wrong foods and drinks along with a stressful lifestyle, yet question why cancer is so rampant. Most of our society live in fear and believe they have no control. My positive message is that we do have control. We need to take back ownership of our bodies and minds. Don't blindly fill prescriptions without first checking into potential side effects, adverse reactions, and long-term damage to your body and mind. Be conscious of what you are consuming. Be informed. Take the initiative to gain more knowledge. Understand your options so you may be in a better position to make an informed choice.

Positive thinking is a coping mechanism, an automatic coping mechanism. It is void of life. Feeling and experiencing the realness of what is actually happening are the essences of being alive. Feeling, connecting, reacting to the flow-- this is all living. Positive thinking happens in the head, meanwhile, it denies the heart its authentic, genuine feelings. Not only does it have the potential to rob you of real and deeper connection which is ultimately necessary to living a passionate and compassionate life; but it even has the potential to cut you off from reality itself. A mask that you put on your face, other people's faces, and throw over everything around you. We do not become positive by refusing to be real. We become positive people by really living, really feeling, and really rising above anything that would threaten to sink us. You can't even see what threatens to sink you if you refuse to acknowledge that it's even there. Why did Titanic sink? Someone refused to see the icebergs.

One guy yelled at me, 'You stupid bitch, how do you live like that with nothing in your brain?' Well, that did it. I wasn't going to put up with that. OK, so I'm not so smart. I'm working class. But it's the working class that keeps the world running, and it's the working classes that get exploited. What kind of revolution is it that just throws out big words that working-class people can't understand? What kind of crap social revolution is that? I mean, I'd like to make the world a better place, too. If somebody's really being exploited, we've got to put a stop to it. That's what I believe, and that's why I ask questions. (...) So that's when it hit me. These guys are fakes. All they've got on their minds is impressing the new girls with the big words they're so proud of, while sticking their hands up their skirts.(...) They marry pretty wives who've never read Marx and have kids they give fancy new names to that are enough to make you puke. Smash what educational-industrial complex? Don't make me laugh! (...) They're scared to death somebody's gonna find out they don't know something. They all read the same books and they all spout the same slogans, and they love listening to John Coltrane and seeing Pasolini movies. You call that 'revolution'? (...) Revolution or not, the working class will just keep on scraping a living in the same old shitholes. And what is a revolution? It sure as hell isn't just changing the name on city hall. But those guys don't know that - those guys with their big words.

That was interesting.Who was that?" Matt looks unhappy. "What?" I ask him. "You'll talk to that guy,but you won't talk to us anymore?" "Sorry," I mumble, and climb out of his car. "He's just a friend.Thanks for the ride." Matt gets out,too. Cherrie starts to follow,but he throws her a sharp look. "So what does that mean?" he calls out. "We aren't friends anymore? You're bailing on us?" I trudge toward the house. "I'm tired, Matt.I'm going to bed." He follows anyway.I dig out my house key,but he grabs my wrist to stop me from opening the door. "Listen,I know you don't want to talk about it,but I just have this one thing to say before you go in there and cry yourself to sleep-" "Matt,please-" "Toph isn't a nice guy.He's never been a nice guy. I don't know what you ever saw in him.He talks back to everyone, he's completely unreliable, he wears those stupid fake clothes-" "Why are you telling me this?" I'm crying again.I pull my wrist from his grasp. "I know you didn't like me as much as I liked you. I know you would have rather been with him,and I dealth with that a long time ago.I'm over it." The shame is overwhelming. Even though I knew Matt was aware that I liked Toph,it's awful to hear him say it aloud. "But I'm still your friend." He's exasperated. "And I'm sick of seeing you waste your energy on that jerk. You've spent all this time afraid to talk about what was going on between you two,but if you'd bothered to just ask him, you would have discovered that he wasn't worth it. But you didn't.You never asked him, did you?" The weight of hurt is unbearable. "Please leave," I whisper. "Please just leave." "Anna." His voice levels, and he waits for me to look at him. "It was still wrong of him and Bridge not to tell you. Okay? You deserve better than that. And I sincerely hope whomever you were just talking to"-Matt gestures toward the phone in my purse-"is better than that.

Frowning, she warmed up the scone she’d saved for Callum. “I could get a pop-up camper to pull behind my truck. When I get a truck, of course. That way, I could move my house every few days and experience different views.” “You’re not living in a camper.” He bit into the scone and chewed angrily. “Excuse me.” The female half of the eavesdropping couple took a step closer to the counter. “Are there any more of those scones?” Lou pasted a regretful smile on her face. “Sorry, no. This was the last one.” “I didn’t see it in the display.” The woman scowled. “I specifically asked if you had any scones, and you said you were out.” “I had to hold this one back. It was defective.” “Defective?” Her eyes darted between Lou’s expression of fake sympathy and the small bite of scone Callum hadn’t eaten yet. “It looked fine.” “I licked it.” Lou heard Callum choke on the last piece of scone, but she couldn’t look at him or she would start laughing. If his airway was blocked, he was going to have to give himself the Heimlich. The woman’s suspicious expression didn’t ease. “Why did you let him eat it then?” “Oh, his tongue is in my mouth all the time,” Lou said sweetly, and Callum’s coughing increased. “I didn’t think he’d mind my germs.” With a sound of frustration, the woman stormed out of the shop, followed closely by the male half of the couple. The bells rang merrily as the door closed behind them, as if celebrating their absence. “Sparks,” Callum rasped once his coughing died down. “You’re going to kill me.” “But what a way to go.” “True.” Grabbing her hand, he pulled her closer and leaned across the counter. “Now give me some of those germs.

And why can't I have an ignore button like my phone? As I hit it, his calls disappear from the screen and the ringing stops. But the tingles are still at my fingertips, as if he sent them through the phone to grab me. Shoving it in my purse-the pockets on skinny jeans must just be for show 'cause nothing else is fitting in there-I smile at Mark. Ah, Mark. The blue-eyed, blond-haired, all-American quarterback. Who knew he had a crush on me all these years? Not Emma McIntosh, that's for dang sure. And not Chloe. Which is weird, because Chloe was a collector of this kind of information. Maybe it's not true. Maybe Mark's only interested in me because Galen was-who wouldn't want to date the girl who dated the hottest guy in school? But that's just fine with me. Mark is...well, Mark isn't as fantabulous as I always imagined he would be. Still, he's good-looking, a star quarterback, and he's not trying to hook me up with his brother. So why am I not excited? The question must be all over my face because Mark's got his eyebrow raised. Not in a judgmental arch, more like an arch of expectation. If he's waiting for an explanation, his puny human lungs can't hold their breath long enough for an answer. Aside from not being his business, I can't exactly explain the details of my relationship with Galen-fake or otherwise. The truth is, I don't know where we can go from here. He ripped holes in my pride like buckshot. And did I mention he broke my heart? He's not just a crush. Not just a physical attraction, someone who can make me forget my own name by pretending to kiss me. Not just a teacher or a snobby fish with Royal blood. Sure, he's all of those things. But he's more than that. He's who I want. Possibly forever.

Okay, that’s fair,” I said. “But it’s not a contest about whose days suck the most, Auggie. The point is we all have to put up with the bad days. Now, unless you want to be treated like a baby the rest of your life, or like a kid with special needs, you just have to suck it up and go.” He didn’t say anything, but I think that last bit was getting to him. “You don’t have to say a word to those kids,” I continued. “August, actually, it’s so cool that you know what they said, but they don’t know you know what they said, you know?” “What the heck?” “You know what I mean. You don’t have to talk to them ever again, if you don’t want. And they’ll never know why. See? Or you can pretend to be friends with them, but deep down inside you know you’re not.” “Is that how you are with Miranda?” he asked. “No,” I answered quickly, defensively. “I never faked my feelings with Miranda.” “So why are you saying I should?” “I’m not! I’m just saying you shouldn’t let those little jerks get to you, that’s all.” “Like Miranda got to you.” “Why do you keep bringing Miranda up?” I yelled impatiently. “I’m trying to talk to you about your friends. Please keep mine out of it.” “You’re not even friends with her anymore.” “What does that have to do with what we’re talking about?” The way August was looking at me reminded me of a doll’s face. He was just staring at me blankly with his half-closed doll eyes. “She called the other day,” he said finally. “What?” I was stunned. “And you didn’t tell me?” “She wasn’t calling you,” he answered, pulling both comic books out of my hands. “She was calling me. Just to say hi. To see how I was doing. She didn’t even know I was going to a real school now. I can’t believe you hadn’t even told her. She said the two of you don’t hang out as much anymore, but she wanted me to know she’d always love me like a big sister.” Double-stunned. Stung. Flabbergasted. No words formed in my mouth. “Why didn’t you tell me?” I said, finally. “I don’t know.” He shrugged, opening the first comic book again. “Well, I’m telling Mom and Dad about Jack Will if you stop going to school,” I answered. “Tushman will probably call you into school and make Jack and those other kids apologize to you in front of everyone, and everyone will treat you like a kid who should be going to a school for kids with special needs. Is that what you want? Because that’s what’s going to happen. Otherwise, just go back to school and act like nothing happened. Or if you want to confront Jack about it, fine. But either way, if you—

Footsteps from the stairwell startle him out of the past. He turns around as Emma's mother takes the last step into the dining area, Emma right behind her. Mrs. McIntosh glides over and puts her arm around him. The smile on her face is genuine, but Emma's smile is more like a straight line. And she's blushing. "Galen, it's very nice to meet you," she says, ushering him into the kitchen. "Emma tells me you're taking her to the beach behind your house today. To swim?" "Yes, ma'am." Her transformation makes him wary. She smiles. "Well, good luck with getting her in the water. Since I'm a little pressed for time, I can't follow you over there, so I just need to see your driver's license while Emma runs outside to get your plate number." Emma rolls her eyes as she shuffles through a drawer and pulls out a pen and paper. She slams the door behind her when she leaves, which shakes the dishes on the wall. Galen nods, pulls out his wallet, and hands over the fake license. Mrs. McIntosh studies it and rummages through her purse until she produces a pen-which she uses to write on her hand. “Just need your license number in case we ever have any problems. But we’re not going to have any problems, are we, Galen? Because you’ll always have my daughter-my only daughter-home on time, isn’t that right?” He nods, then swallows. She holds out his license. When he accepts it, she grabs his wrist, pulling him close. She glances at the garage door and back to him. “Tell me right now, Galen Forza. Are you or are you not dating my daughter?” Great. She still doesn’t believe Emma. If she won’t believe them anyway, why keep trying to convince her? If she thinks they’re dating, the time he intends to spend with Emma will seem normal. But if they spend time together and tell her they’re not dating, she’ll be nothing but suspicious. Possibly even spy on them-which is less than ideal. So, dating Emma is the only way to make sure she mates with Grom. Things just get better and better. “Yes,” he says. “We’re definitely dating.” She narrows her eyes. “Why would she tell me you’re not?” He shrugs. “Maybe she’s ashamed of me.” To his surprise, she chuckles. “I seriously doubt that, Galen Forza.” Her humor is short lived. She grabs a fistful of his T-shirt. “Are you sleeping with her?” Sleeping…Didn’t Rachel say sleeping and mating are the same thing? Dating and mating are similar. But sleeping and mating are the same exact same. He shakes his head. “No, ma’am.” She raises a no-nonsense brow. “Why not? What’s wrong with my daughter?” That is unexpected. He suspects this woman can sense a lie like Toraf can track Rayna. All she’s looking for is honesty, but the real truth would just get him arrested. I’m crazy about your daughter-I’m just saving her for my brother. So he seasons his answer with the frankness she seems to crave. “There’s nothing wrong with your daughter, Mrs. McIntosh. I said we’re not sleeping together. I didn’t say I didn’t want to.” She inhales sharply and releases him. Clearing her throat, she smoothes out his wrinkled shirt with her hand, then pats his chest. “Good answer, Galen. Good answer.” Emma flings open the garage door and stops short. “Mom, what are you doing?” Mrs. McIntosh steps away and stalks to the counter. “Galen and I were just chitchatting. What took you so long?” Galen guesses her ability to sense a lie probably has something to do with her ability to tell one. Emma shoots him a quizzical look, but he returns a casual shrug. Her mother grabs a set of keys from a hook by the refrigerator and nudges her daughter out of the way, but not before snatching the paper out of her hand.

I hope I have now made it clear why I thought it best, in speaking of the dissonances between fiction and reality in our own time, to concentrate on Sartre. His hesitations, retractations, inconsistencies, all proceed from his consciousness of the problems: how do novelistic differ from existential fictions? How far is it inevitable that a novel give a novel-shaped account of the world? How can one control, and how make profitable, the dissonances between that account and the account given by the mind working independently of the novel? For Sartre it was ultimately, like most or all problems, one of freedom. For Miss Murdoch it is a problem of love, the power by which we apprehend the opacity of persons to the degree that we will not limit them by forcing them into selfish patterns. Both of them are talking, when they speak of freedom and love, about the imagination. The imagination, we recall, is a form-giving power, an esemplastic power; it may require, to use Simone Weil's words, to be preceded by a 'decreative' act, but it is certainly a maker of orders and concords. We apply it to all forces which satisfy the variety of human needs that are met by apparently gratuitous forms. These forms console; if they mitigate our existential anguish it is because we weakly collaborate with them, as we collaborate with language in order to communicate. Whether or no we are predisposed towards acceptance of them, we learn them as we learn a language. On one view they are 'the heroic children whom time breeds / Against the first idea,' but on another they destroy by falsehood the heroic anguish of our present loneliness. If they appear in shapes preposterously false we will reject them; but they change with us, and every act of reading or writing a novel is a tacit acceptance of them. If they ruin our innocence, we have to remember that the innocent eye sees nothing. If they make us guilty, they enable us, in a manner nothing else can duplicate, to submit, as we must, the show of things to the desires of the mind. I shall end by saying a little more about La Nausée, the book I chose because, although it is a novel, it reflects a philosophy it must, in so far as it possesses novel form, belie. Under one aspect it is what Philip Thody calls 'an extensive illustration' of the world's contingency and the absurdity of the human situation. Mr. Thody adds that it is the novelist's task to 'overcome contingency'; so that if the illustration were too extensive the novel would be a bad one. Sartre himself provides a more inclusive formula when he says that 'the final aim of art is to reclaim the world by revealing it as it is, but as if it had its source in human liberty.' This statement does two things. First, it links the fictions of art with those of living and choosing. Secondly, it means that the humanizing of the world's contingency cannot be achieved without a representation of that contingency. This representation must be such that it induces the proper sense of horror at the utter difference, the utter shapelessness, and the utter inhumanity of what must be humanized. And it has to occur simultaneously with the as if, the act of form, of humanization, which assuages the horror. This recognition, that form must not regress into myth, and that contingency must be formalized, makes La Nausée something of a model of the conflicts in the modern theory of the novel. How to do justice to a chaotic, viscously contingent reality, and yet redeem it? How to justify the fictive beginnings, crises, ends; the atavism of character, which we cannot prevent from growing, in Yeats's figure, like ash on a burning stick? The novel will end; a full close may be avoided, but there will be a close: a fake fullstop, an 'exhaustion of aspects,' as Ford calls it, an ironic return to the origin, as in Finnegans Wake and Comment c'est. Perhaps the book will end by saying that it has provided the clues for another, in which contingency will be defeated, ...

John Isidore said, “I found a spider.” The three androids glanced up, momentarily moving their attention from the TV screen to him. “Let’s see it,” Pris said. She held out her hand. Roy Baty said, “Don’t talk while Buster is on.” “I’ve never seen a spider,” Pris said. She cupped the medicine bottle in her palms, surveying the creature within. “All those legs. Why’s it need so many legs, J. R.?” “That’s the way spiders are,” Isidore said, his heart pounding; he had difficulty breathing. “Eight legs.” Rising to her feet, Pris said, “You know what I think, J. R.? I think it doesn’t need all those legs.” “Eight?” Irmgard Baty said. “Why couldn’t it get by on four? Cut four off and see.” Impulsively opening her purse, she produced a pair of clean, sharp cuticle scissors, which she passed to Pris. A weird terror struck at J. R. Isidore. Carrying the medicine bottle into the kitchen, Pris seated herself at J. R. Isidore’s breakfast table. She removed the lid from the bottle and dumped the spider out. “It probably won’t be able to run as fast,” she said, “but there’s nothing for it to catch around here anyhow. It’ll die anyway.” She reached for the scissors. “Please,” Isidore said. Pris glanced up inquiringly. “Is it worth something?” “Don’t mutilate it,” he said wheezingly. Imploringly. With the scissors, Pris snipped off one of the spider’s legs. In the living room Buster Friendly on the TV screen said, “Take a look at this enlargement of a section of background. This is the sky you usually see. Wait, I’ll have Earl Parameter, head of my research staff, explain their virtually world-shaking discovery to you.” Pris clipped off another leg, restraining the spider with the edge of her hand. She was smiling. “Blowups of the video pictures,” a new voice from the TV said, “when subjected to rigorous laboratory scrutiny, reveal that the gray backdrop of sky and daytime moon against which Mercer moves is not only not Terran—it is artificial.” “You’re missing it!” Irmgard called anxiously to Pris; she rushed to the kitchen door, saw what Pris had begun doing. “Oh, do that afterward,” she said coaxingly. “This is so important, what they’re saying; it proves that everything we believed—” “Be quiet,” Roy Baty said. “—is true,” Irmgard finished. The TV set continued, “The ‘moon’ is painted; in the enlargements, one of which you see now on your screen, brush strokes show. And there is even some evidence that the scraggly weeds and dismal, sterile soil—perhaps even the stones hurled at Mercer by unseen alleged parties—are equally faked. It is quite possible in fact that the ‘stones’ are made of soft plastic, causing no authentic wounds.” “In other words,” Buster Friendly broke in, “Wilbur Mercer is not suffering at all.” The research chief said, “We at last managed, Mr. Friendly, to track down a former Hollywood special-effects man, a Mr. Wade Cortot, who flatly states, from his years of experience, that the figure of ‘Mercer’ could well be merely some bit player marching across a sound stage. Cortot has gone so far as to declare that he recognizes the stage as one used by a now out-of-business minor moviemaker with whom Cortot had various dealings several decades ago.” “So according to Cortot,” Buster Friendly said, “there can be virtually no doubt.” Pris had now cut three legs from the spider, which crept about miserably on the kitchen table, seeking a way out, a path to freedom. It found none.