Zebra Ins Quotes

My mom and dad died, but in their place I got a house of fog that’s easy to hide my feelings in. (No smoking, please.)


Call me paranoid, but the shape the human hand makes when extending out for a handshake looks suspiciously like a karate chop. Maybe diplomacy, especially in DC, could use a little kung fu mixed in.

Freud was fascinated with depression and focused on the issue that we began with—why is it that most of us can have occasional terrible experiences, feel depressed, and then recover, while a few of us collapse into major depression (melancholia)? In his classic essay “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917), Freud began with what the two have in common. In both cases, he felt, there is the loss of a love object. (In Freudian terms, such an “object” is usually a person, but can also be a goal or an ideal.) In Freud’s formulation, in every loving relationship there is ambivalence, mixed feelings—elements of hatred as well as love. In the case of a small, reactive depression—mourning—you are able to deal with those mixed feelings in a healthy manner: you lose, you grieve, and then you recover. In the case of a major melancholic depression, you have become obsessed with the ambivalence—the simultaneity, the irreconcilable nature of the intense love alongside the intense hatred. Melancholia—a major depression—Freud theorized, is the internal conflict generated by this ambivalence. This can begin to explain the intensity of grief experienced in a major depression. If you are obsessed with the intensely mixed feelings, you grieve doubly after a loss—for your loss of the loved individual and for the loss of any chance now to ever resolve the difficulties. “If only I had said the things I needed to, if only we could have worked things out”—for all of time, you have lost the chance to purge yourself of the ambivalence. For the rest of your life, you will be reaching for the door to let you into a place of pure, unsullied love, and you can never reach that door. It also explains the intensity of the guilt often experienced in major depression. If you truly harbored intense anger toward the person along with love, in the aftermath of your loss there must be some facet of you that is celebrating, alongside the grieving. “He’s gone; that’s terrible but…thank god, I can finally live, I can finally grow up, no more of this or that.” Inevitably, a metaphorical instant later, there must come a paralyzing belief that you have become a horrible monster to feel any sense of relief or pleasure at a time like this. Incapacitating guilt. This theory also explains the tendency of major depressives in such circumstances to, oddly, begin to take on some of the traits of the lost loved/hated one—and not just any traits, but invariably the ones that the survivor found most irritating. Psychodynamically, this is wonderfully logical. By taking on a trait, you are being loyal to your lost, beloved opponent. By picking an irritating trait, you are still trying to convince the world you were right to be irritated—you see how you hate it when I do it; can you imagine what it was like to have to put up with that for years? And by picking a trait that, most of all, you find irritating, you are not only still trying to score points in your argument with the departed, but you are punishing yourself for arguing as well. Out of the Freudian school of thought has come one of the more apt descriptions of depression—“aggression turned inward.” Suddenly the loss of pleasure, the psychomotor retardation, the impulse to suicide all make sense. As do the elevated glucocorticoid levels. This does not describe someone too lethargic to function; it is more like the actual state of a patient in depression, exhausted from the most draining emotional conflict of his or her life—one going on entirely within. If that doesn’t count as psychologically stressful, I don’t know what does.

Don't you know that the less you tell someone, the more they want to know? You're better off to make something up than to say nothing at all." "I'm the youngest of twelve children of two South African missionaries," he said with such ease,she very nearly believed him. "When I was six,I wandered into the jungle and was taken in by a pride of lions.I still have a pechant for zebra meat.Then when I was eightteen,I was captured by hunters and sold to a circus.For five years I was the star of the sideshow." "The Lion Boy," Gennie put in. "Naturally.One night during a storm the tent caught fire.In the confusion I escaped.Living off the land, I wandered the country-stealing a few chickens now and again.Eventually an old hermit took me in after I'd saved him from a grizzly." "With your bare hands," Gennie added. "I'm telling the story," he reminded her. "He taught me to read and write. On his deathbead he told me where he'd buried his life savings-a quarter million in gold bullion. After giving him the Viking funeral he'd requested, I had to decide whether to be a stockbroker or go back to the wilderness." "So you decided against Wall Street, came here, and began to collect stamps." "That's about it." "Well," Gennie said after a moment. "With a boring story like that, I can see why you keep it to yourself." "You asked," Grant pointed out. "You might have made something up." "No imagination." She laughed then and leaned her head on his shoulder. "No,I can see you have a very literal mind.

Lieutenant-Colonel Yorke told me you Torchwood people always take the extreme view. We have a saying in basic training: "If you hear hoof-beats, you look for horses, and not zebras".' 'You don't know the half of it,' Gwen said. 'In my job, if I hear hoof-beats, I expect to see unicorns.

The health risk of poverty turns out to be a huge effect, the biggest risk factor there is in all of behavioral medicine—in other words, if you have a bunch of people of the same gender, age, and ethnicity and you want to make some predictions about who is going to live how long, the single most useful fact to know is each person’s SES.

We saw sundials built 300 years ago that are more accurate than any watch or calendar developed electronically today. We got cold feet when it came to crossing the road in Jaipur and decided whatever was on the other side wasn’t worth attempting to cross even on a zebra crossing. We ate in a restaurant that clearly indicated ‘No firearms or guns permitted,’ which made us feel safe. We saw a street fight in Agra over a traffic situation, the only one in the whole ten days. And we learned that when a car driver honks his horn it means, “I’m turning left,” or “I’m turning right,” or “I’m going straight ahead,” or “I’m overtaking on the inside,” or “I’m overtaking on the outside,” or “I just feel like honking my horn for absolutely no reason whatsoever other than I haven’t done it in a while.

Beginning in the early 1980s, various researchers, including myself, showed that this “glucocorticoid neurotoxicity” was not just a pharmacological effect, but was relevant to normal brain aging in the rat. Collectively, the studies showed that lots of glucocorticoid exposure (in the range seen during stress) or lots of stress itself would accelerate the degeneration of the aging hippocampus. Conversely, diminishing glucocorticoid levels (by removing the adrenals of the rat) would delay hippocampal aging. And as one might expect by now, the extent of glucocorticoid exposure over the rat’s lifetime not only determined how much hippocampal degeneration there would be in old age, but how much memory loss as well.

On this second trip, Jung had something like a mystical or metaphysical experience. He suddenly understood the meaning of self-consciousness, in an otherwise apparently oblivious universe. It was through our awareness of existence, Jung understood, that it gains meaning. On a game preserve on the Athai Plains, Jung saw huge herds of animals: antelopes, zebras, gazelles stretched endlessly to the horizon. He felt he witnessed “the stillness of the eternal beginning, the world as it had always been, in the state of non-being; for until then no one had been present to know that it was this world.” Jung separated from his companions until they were out of sight and imagined he was utterly alone. He was trying to re-create the first moment of self-consciousness, when consciousness first recognized the distinction between itself and the world, when it could first regard the world objectively, detached from it, as an observer. “In an invisible act of creation,” man had “put the stamp of perfection on the world by giving it objective existence.

I told him he needed a faucet and a basin, and I let this information sink in.

Expertise is about qualification and experience. Excellence is about quality of mind and awareness. Where expertise fails, the quest for excellence begins. Excellence often begins with examination of our own minds. Professional excellence is a result of developing a quality mind through constant awareness. Experts tend to think of themselves as those who have finally reached their goal. Those in pursuit of excellence are always beginners. Excellence is a journey without a finish line. It begins every day with a new awakening and a new insight that enriches the mind. Come, let’s begin!

There is a difference between a learned man and a man of learning. A learned man is tied to the knowledge of the past. A man of learning is curious about the present. A learned man is bent over with dead wood of knowledge, like an aging tree. A man of learning is vibrant and inquisitive, like a green twig breaking out of the soil after the rains

Isn’t twenty-four a little late for the big rebellion?” “Harriet has been living under military occupation. She’s a fugitive from injustice.” “So she takes up with a fugitive from justice. I’ve seen it happen before.” Royal paused. “How much danger do you think she’s in?

When one’s heart hasn’t turned to stone, one cannot kill off vanity, the painful longing to be heard, flattered, loved, cherished, et cetera. Our vain heart leads us to do the most absurd things and embark on lunatic initiatives: to interfere in other people’s lives, to catechize them in one way or another—in a word (and this I underlined for emphasis), to invade their solitude.

But there is also the HUMPED ZEBRA CROSSING, which sounds like a zoo genetics experiment gone horribly wrong. (Really it's just a pedestrian right of way path with a sleeping policeman–also known as a speed bump–in the middle).