Absorbing Quotes

It is in no way, shape or form your cosmic duty or responsibility to take away the pain of other people. This is because by absorbing the pain of others, you are depriving them of a vital element of their spiritual evolution and karmic responsibility. ~ Mateo Sol

She was wet with my crying. Up around her collar the cotton of her dress was plastered to her skin. I could see her darkness shining through the wet places. She was like a sponge, absorbing what I couldn't hold anymore. ~ Sue Monk Kidd

[Skinner] does not invoke other events, processes, or mechanisms which are hypothesized or invented for the purpose of mediating between behavior and its empirical determinants. This omission is sometimes misconstrued as a denial that mediating mechanisms exist; they obviously do, they are obviously neurological and they are also obviously themselves lawful. ...The argument [against employing them as part of scientific practice] is simplicity itself... [Skinner] considers such theoretical terms unnecessary; they may generate research whose only usefulness is to disconfirm the mediating entity or redefine it without increasing our knowledge of behavior's controlling variables; they can become the absorbing focus of an inquiry and so deflect attention from behavior itself; they can become a "refuge from the data". ~ Kenneth MacCorquodale

We're going to line up some professionals - counselors. The reality is just setting in for all of us. We didn't have the benefit of looking from the outside in. They're still absorbing everything that did happen. There will finally be some realization of what happened - as it's been described to us, the worst disaster in our country's history. ~ Rick Dickson

The spectacle that falsifies reality is nevertheless a real product of that reality. Conversely, real life is materially invaded by the contemplation of the spectacle, and ends up absorbing it and aligning itself with it. Objective reality is present on both sides. ~ Anonymous

I saw literature as a fantasy, no less absorbing for all its irrelevance - a parallel life, as dreams shadow waking but never intersect it. ~ Edmund White

If we give way to self-pity and indulge in the luxury of misery, we remove God's riches from our lives and hinder others from entering into His provision. No sin is worse than the sin of self-pity, because it removes God from the throne of our lives, replacing Him with our own self-interests. It causes us to open our mouths only to complain, and we simply become spiritual sponges - always absorbing, never giving, and never being satisfied. And there is nothing lovely or generous about our lives. ~ Oswald Chambers

In The Last of Her Kind, Sigrid Nunez once again creates characters of such depth and situations of such vivid moral complexity that reading these pages is like living them. Only as I closed the book did I sadly realize that Georgette and Ann weren't my neighbors. But happily I can revisit them again, and again, in this beautiful and absorbing novel. ~ Margot Livesey

Imagining themes that are specific to coating lines, shapes, shades, thoughts, the decoration of our homes and the objects of utility or pure pleasure, adapting its purpose in a material-specific way to metal or wood, marble or fabric - it is, without any doubt, an absorbing occupation. ~ Emile Galle

The age of printed pamphlets and political essays has long since been replaced by television, a distracting and absorbing medium which seems determined to entertain itself more than it informs and educates. ~ Al Gore

Every autobiography ... becomes an absorbing work of fiction, with something of the charm of a cryptogram. ~ H.L. Mencken

THE NEW

All that appeared true seems to be coming unglued;
All that was established is being questioned anew;
All that was in place is being quickly erased;

We are coming to a crossroad on a collision course and the train is rapidly accelerating;
The winds of the New are howling and anxious to be embraced;
The usual is blinding and needs to be replaced;

So turn it around and rethink your thoughts;
The old ways are going and the cracks are showing;
Reshape the unchangeable and shake the unshakable;
Then face the new light with its brilliance absorbing you;

Now you've left behind what shouldn't have been and attained a new plateau to view the past;
When you arise the old will be left in the wake;
And you will go forward to a better place.

The Complaint, page 34. ~ Tom Breen

In a state of flow, however, maintaining focused attention on these absorbing activities requires no exertion of self-control, thereby freeing resources to be directed to the task at hand. ~ Daniel Kahneman

A multiverse hurtling toward an inevitable heat death 100 trillion years in the future. An alien race of religious fanatics bent on absorbing all sentient life. Another alien race fighting back. A world of magicians living in secret. And himself, a contractor, a human Vorid that could absorb his enemies and grow stronger. All in less than 24 hours. And here he was, relaxing on his roof. Maybe video games really did desensitize you to this stuff. Except if he died, he wasn't going to pop back to life. ~ Andrew Ball

We will never stand in awe of being loved by God until we reckon with the seriousness of our sin and the justice of his wrath against us. But when, by grace, we waken to our unworthiness, then we may look at the suffering and death of Christ and say, "In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the [wrath-absorbing] propitiation for our sins" (1 John 4:10). ~ John Piper

Life, Steffi has learned, carries on around the pain, making room for it, absorbing it until it becomes part of the daily fabric, wrapping itself around you and lodging itself in your heart. ~ Jane Green

When you leave a job, one of the hardest decisions you have to make on cleaning out your desk is what to do with the coffinlike cardboard tray holding 958 fresh-smelling business cards. You can't throw them out - they and the nameplate and a few sample payroll stubs are proof to yourself that you once showed up at that building every day and solved complicated, utterly absorbing problems there; unfortunately, the problems themselves, though they once obsessed you, and kept you working late night after night, and made you talk in your sleep, turn out to have been hollow: two weeks after your last day that already have contracted into inert pellets one-fiftieth of their former size; you find yourself unable to create the sense of what was really at stake, for it seems to have been the Hungarian 5/2 rhythm of the lived workweek alone that kept each fascinating crisis inflated to its full interdepartmental complexity. But coterminously, while the problems you were paid to solve collapse, the nod of the security guard, his sign-in book, the escalator ride, the things on your desk, the site of colleagues' offices, their faces seen from characteristic angles, the features of the corporate bathroom, all miraculously expand: and in this way what was central and what was incidental end up exactly reversed. ~ Nicholson Baker

Were the situation not so completely to her disadvantage, she might have enjoyed the prospect of Simon Hunt rendered absolutely speechless.
At first his face was blank, as if he was having tremendous difficulty absorbing the fact that she was standing before him dressed only in a chemise, corset, and drawers. His gaze slid over her, slowly coming to rest on her flushed face. Another moment or two of suffocated silence, and Hunt swallowed hard before speaking in a rusty-sounding voice. "I probably shouldn't ask. But what the hell are you doing?"
The words unlocked Annabelle from her paralysis. She certainly could not stand there and converse with him while she was clad in her undergarments. But her dignity - or the threads that remained of it - demanded that she not screech idiotically and dash for her clothes the way Evie and Daisy were doing. Settling for a compromise, she strode briskly to her discarded gown and clasped it to her front as she turned to face Simon Hunt once more. "We're playing Rounders," she said, her voice far higher-pitched than usual.
Hunt glanced around the scene before settling on her again. "Why did you - "
"One can't run properly in skirts," Annabelle interrupted. "I should think that would be obvious."
Absorbing that, Hunt averted his face swiftly, but not before she saw the sudden flash of his grin. "Never having tried it, I'll have to take your word on that. ~ Lisa Kleypas

As I began painting myself, I
started making connection with
all that was painted around me.

With further immersion into it,
my connection deepened and
I was simply transformed from the
painter to the canvas itself
all observing, all absorbing ~ Rabb Jyot

He couldn't have known it, but among the original run of The History of Love, at least one copy was destined to change a life.

This particular book was one of the last of the two thousand to be printed, and sat for longer than the rest in a warehouse in the outskirts of Santiago, absorbing the humidity. From there it was finally sent to a bookstore in Buenos Aires. The careless owner hardly noticed it, and for some years it languished on the shelves, acquiring a pattern of mildew across the cover. It was a slim volume, and its position on the shelf wasn't exactly prime: crowded on the left by an overweight biography of a minor actress, and on the right by the once-bestselling novel of an author that everyone had since forgotten, it hardly left its spine visible to even the most rigorous browser. When the store changed owners it fell victim to a massive clearance, and was trucked off to another warehouse, foul, dingy, crawling with daddy longlegs, where it remained in the dark and damp before finally being sent to a small secondhand bookstore not far from the home of the writer Jorge Luis Borges.

The owner took her time unpacking the books she'd bought cheaply and in bulk from the warehouse. One morning, going through the boxes, she discovered the mildewed copy of The History of Love. She'd never heard of it, but the title caught her eye. She put it aside, and during a slow hour in the shop she read the opening chapter, called 'The Age of Silence.'
Nicole Krauss

The sight of a fair young girl, as frank and wholesome as the Sierra breezes, had stirred his volcanic, untamed heart to its very depths. When she had vanished from his sight, he realized that a crisis had come in his life, and that neither silver speculations nor any other questions could ever be of such importance to him as this new and all-absorbing one. The love which had sprung up in his heart was not the sudden, changeable fancy of a boy, but rather the wild, fierce passion of a man of strong will and imperious temper. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle

Your obligation is that of active participation. You should not act as knowledge-absorbing sponges, but as whetstones on which we can all sharpen our wits ~ Edsger W. Dijkstra

I don't want to go on being a root in the dark,
vacillating, stretched out, shivering with sleep,
downward, in the soaked guts of the earth,
absorbing and thinking, eating each day. ~ Pablo Neruda

So these days, I'm on the lookout for grace, and I'm especially on the lookout for ways that I withhold grace from myself and from other people. At first, showing people grace makes you feel powerful, like scattering candy from a float in a parade - grace for you, grace for you. You become almost giddy, thinking of people in generous ways, allowing for their faults, absorbing minor irritations. You feel great, and then you start to feel just ever so slightly superior, because you're so incredibly evolved and gracious. But then inevitably something happens, and it usually involves you confronting one of your worst selves, often in public, and you realize that you're not throwing candy off a float to a nameless, dirty public, but rather that you are that nameless, dirty public, and that you are starving and on your knees, praying for a little piece of sweetness, just one mouthful of grace. ~ Shauna Niequist

Life is a constant battle of fighting your own fears and not absorbing others. Don't fill the empty spaces of your heart with the fears of others in your life. It is the highly anxious person that will tell you that certain people and experiences need to be labeled and kept either close or at a distance. They go to great lengths to categorize things, in order to feel balance in their life because they are out of balance. Life to them is about control and making you believe that their perfect world is normal when there is nothing normal about it. Highly anxious people live through manipulating their world into what is easy and palatable to them and they can easily pull you into an unrealistic view of the world around them. You constantly have to reassess what is reasonable and what is over exaggerated because fear drives their every action. ~ Shannon L. Alder

He lies there listening to it, absorbing this sense of his own quiet drone transmuted into something of certain substance, something large, magnificent and grand - no longer him, no, but something bursting from him, leaving his split carcass behind as a monument to its source, its host, its feeding ground. ~ Patrick Bryant

The biggest challenge facing the great teachers and communicators of history is not to teach history itself, nor even the lessons of history, but why history matters. How to ignite the first spark of the will o'the wisp, the Jack o'lantern, the ignis fatuus [foolish fire] beloved of poets, which lights up one source of history and then another, zigzagging across the marsh, connecting and linking and writing bright words across the dark face of the present. There's no phrase I can come up that will encapsulate in a winning sound-bite why history matters. We know that history matters, we know that it is thrilling, absorbing, fascinating, delightful and infuriating, that it is life. Yet I can't help wondering if it's a bit like being a Wagnerite; you just have to get used to the fact that some people are never going to listen. ~ Stephen Fry

While every new fantasy author is hailed as unique, new, and different, Brandon Sanderson's ELANTRIS does indeed provide an absorbing adventure in a unique, different, and well-thought-out fantasy world, with a few nifty twists as well. ~ L.E. Modesitt Jr.

I struggled to find my words in all that black space. It took all my strength to keep my eyes from closing and the darkness from absorbing me. I had no hope. I felt no joy. I saw no future that didn't fill me with anguish, so I didn't think at all. I didn't make words or cast spells. I just was. And that was all I could manage. ~ Amy Harmon

I listen to lots of music, especially Bach, opera (all periods), German lieder, chamber music, and rock, old and new. I can't listen to music while I write. It's too absorbing. ~ Cheryl Mendelson

Inside you're like some kind of mirror, reflecting everything without absorbing it. ~ Arthur J. Deikman

I've always been a sponge, just absorbing whatever I see, whether it's in daily life or in art. ~ Tomi Ungerer

For me the most valuable part of this kind of research, however, is just hanging out with the men and women on the job, listening to them, absorbing the atmosphere and attitudes of their world. ~ Tami Hoag

When I saw you … dying, it was … I never thought I'd feel fear like that again. But you've given me so much of yourself, all your memories - all of you. It's been like absorbing a whole other person. So when that eerie crushed the air from your lungs, it felt like my heart stopped. Like it would stop the second yours did."

The world tilted, went askew. I dared to utter, "That's a bad thing, right? ~ S.B. Nova

He (Lin-Manuel Miranda) listened to his young castmates with the same absorbing interest he lavished on the old masters, and let himself be guided by both, ~ Jasmine Cephas Jones

I personally believe breathatarianism to be the highest mode of human living [ ... ] breathing in pure air, absorbing the direct light and energies of the sun, bathing in pure water [ ... ] I look at the obituaries every morning and ain't nobody listed but you eaters. ~ Dick Gregory

Yep, and your Internet was their invention, this magical convenience that creeps now like a smell through the smallest details of our lives, the shopping, the housework, the homework, the taxes, absorbing our energy, eating up our precious time. And there's no innocence. Anywhere. Never was. It was conceived in sin, the worst possible. As it kept growing, it never stopped carrying in its heart a bitter-cold death wish for the planet, and don't think anything has changed, kid. ~ Thomas Pynchon

I love libraries. Everybody there is serious and focused even if they are not absorbing or learning anything better ~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Clever, witty and absorbing, Amortality is a much-needed anatomy of our profound malaise about ageing. Its charms will never fade. ~ David Baddiel

There are certain themes of which the interest is all-absorbing, but which are too entirely horrible for the purposes of legitimate fiction. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

I think I am like most people in letting myself worry about things that didn't matter. Concepts like quotidian and humdrum prevented me for years from really absorbing the miraculous strangeness of bombing around a star on a tottering planet, of watching the world unfold in time. ~ Marilynne Robinson

A moth is such a simple machine in the animal world - the go-kart to the modern car - and it takes a lot of glitches to prevent it going. It's this intriguing simplicity, the idea that you could pull it into its constituent parts and put it back together in the same rainy day, that if you pulled back the skin, you could watch the inner workings, that makes a moth such an absorbing creature to study. Moths have a universal character: there are no individuals. Each reacts to a precise condition or stimulus in a predictable and replicable way. They are pre-programmed robots, unable to learn from experience. For instance, we know they will allways react to a smell, a pheromone or a particular spectrum of light in the same way. I can mimic the scent of a flower so that a moth will direct itself towards that scent ... ~ Poppy Adams

One of the gravest perils which besets the ministry is a restless scattering of energies over an amazing multiplicity of interests which leaves no margin of time and of strength for receptive and absorbing communion with God. ~ Bonar Law

though there was something so fascinating and absorbing to my engaged mind, that I frequently long to reproduce its unearthly music and sights. ~ R.B. Stratton

When I was 18 I was just absorbing everything around me: whatever happens, happens. I was so naive and willing to ride whatever wave life threw at me. ~ Paul Wesley

The sun was reaching the meridian and Bhishma knew his departure was near. He controlled his mind, absorbing it in thoughts of Krishna alone. Thinking of Krishna's many divine pastimes during his presence on earth, he spoke one final time. "I can now meditate with full concentration upon that one Lord, Krishna, visible before me, because I have transcended the misconception of duality. It is this Krishna who is present in everyone's heart and who is the ultimate destination for all transcendentalists, including those who accept the absolute truth as being simply the Brahman. Even though different people in different parts of the world may perceive the sun differently, the sun is one. I therefore surrender myself fully to that allpowerful, omnipresent Krishna. May all be well with the worlds. ~ Krishna Dharma

A great friend can act like a trash can with a hole in the bottom. To listen to someone else's personal garbage with the same empathy you would spend listening to their joy, and then release that garbage just as quickly as you hear it, without absorbing it, makes you a wonderful friend to that person
and an even better one to yourself. ~ Doug "Ten" Rose

There are two kinds of actors
one sits in a dressing room waiting for his call and the other gets out into the business and polishes his craft by absorbing everything. I don't know enough, I'll never learn everything I need to learn. When a guy thinks he's already learned it, he can only go backwards. ~ Clint Eastwood

Somewhere out of sight a punching-bag was rat-tat-tatting on a board. I stepped through a doorless aperture opposite the door I'd come in by, and found myself in the main hall. It was comparatively small, with seats for maybe a thousand rising on four sides to the girders that held up the roof. An ingot of lead-gray light from a skylight fell through the moted air onto the empty roped square on the central platform. Still no people, but you could tell that people had been there. The same air had hung for months in the windowless building, absorbing the smells of human sweat and breath, roasted peanuts and beer, white and brown cigarettes, Ben Hur perfume and bay rum and hair oil and tired feet. A social researcher with a good nose could have written a Ph.D. thesis about that air. ~ Ross Macdonald

But man is above all a social and political animal; his relations with his fellow human beings form his most absorbing and important interest. ~ Logan Pearsall Smith

I think people have to sharpen their eyes and look. I always feel like a big sponge: I feel like I learn lots of things by osmosis, and I feel that I'm always absorbing. I mean, when people say, 'What is your inspiration?' I could throw up. I mean, I'm inspired by the fact I get up in the morning. And I'm still here. ~ Iris Apfel

The persistence of an all-absorbing idea is terrible. ~ Victor Hugo

The harder I push, the more I find within myself. I am always looking for the next step, a different world to go into, areas where I have not been before. It's lonely driving a Grand Prix car, but very absorbing. I have experienced new sensations, and I want more. That is my excitement, my motivation. ~ Ayrton Senna

Absorbing water from the clouds would make more sense than believing our lakes are a gift from the sky god. But when presented with the evidence, I see how much more terrifying it is to think we're on our own. ~ Lauren DeStefano

The fact remains that the overwhelming majority of people who have become wealthy have become so thanks to work they found profoundly absorbing. The long term study of people who eventually became wealthy clearly reveals that their 'luck' arose from accidental dedication they had to an arena they enjoyed. ~ Srully Blotnick

Laila Lalami has fashioned an absorbing story of one of the first encounters between Spanish conquistadores and Native Americans, a frightening, brutal, and much-falsified history that here, in her brilliantly imagined fiction, is rewritten to give us something that feels very like the truth. ~ Salman Rushdie

It helps immerse yourself in what you potentially want to do. Being involved, learning firsthand and observing the craft and absorbing all you can, makes it easier to define what you want. It will also ultimately make you a better Chef. Culinary school, or even a single class, is a great bet too. ~ Giada De Laurentiis

Charles Sumner's mind had reached the calm of WATER which receives and reflects images without absorbing them; it contains nothing but itself. ~ Henry Adams

Reading off a page is like looking down at a landscape from a balloon – your eye "sees" the story as well as reads it, its layout, its paragraphs and structure, and "remembers" what it just read because it's still there, on the page, simultaneously. If you want to, you can reread any line instantly; or linger; or speed up; or optically "flinch." Reading a series of tweets is more like looking through a narrow window from a train speeding through a landscape full of tunnels and bands of light and dark. Each tweet erases its predecessor. ~ David Mitchell

Consider paint a film of light reflecting/absorbing material, and a colored paint a material which gives a particular, characteristic transmission of light via differential absorption and reflection. Call this reflected quality 'luminance' and measure it in millilamberts. This measure is as real and present as height, breadth, depth; and I find the phenomenon equally sumptuous and convincing ... Painted light, not color, not form, not perspective, or line, not image, or words, or equations, is painting. I make paintings which do not represent light, they are light. ~ Jo Baer

It was to the small serious boy that he turned for his enjoyment. He had bought the child some cheap wooden blocks, and with these the little one played endlessly and intently, with a purpose obscure to the adult mind, but completely absorbing. ~ Alan Paton

In the past, we had objects to believe in - objects of belief. These have disappeared. But we also had objects not to believe in, which is just as vital a function. Transitional objects, ironic ones, so to speak, objects of our indifference, ... Ideologies played this role reasonably well. These, too, have disappeared. And we survive only by a reflex action of collective credulity, which consists not only in absorbing everything put about under the heading of news or information, but in believing in the principal and transcendence of information. ~ Jean Baudrillard

Conversely, real life is materially invaded by the contemplation of the spectacle, and ends up absorbing it and aligning itself with it. ~ Guy Debord

Sometimes we need to heed our fears and negative thoughts, and at all times we need to be alert to the world outside ourselves, even when that includes absorbing bad news and entertaining the views of "negative" people. ~ Barbara Ehrenreich

Working hours are never long enough. Each day is a holiday, and ordinary holidays are grudged as enforced interruptions in an absorbing vocation. ~ Winston Churchill

The relation between the white and black races in Africa in many ways resembles the relation between the two sexes.
If the one of the two sexes were told that they did not play any greater part in the life of the other sex than this other sex plays within their own existence, they would be shocked and hurt.
[ ... ]
If they (white people) had been told that they played no more important part in the lives of the Natives than the Natives played in their own lives, they would have been highly indignant and ill at ease.
If you had told the Natives that they played no greater part in the life of the white people than the white people played in their lives, they would never have believed you, but would have laughed at you. Probably in Natives circles, stories are passing about, and being repeated, which prove the all-absorbing interest of the white people in the Kikuyu or Kavirondo, and their complete dependence upon them. ~ Karen Blixen

Therefore the solid body of the earth is reasonably considered as being the largest relative to those moving against it and as remaining unmoved in any direction by the force of the very small weights, and as it were absorbing their fall. And if it had some one common movement, the same as that of the other weights, it would clearly leave them all behind because of its much greater magnitude. And the animals and other weights would be left hanging in the air, and the earth would very quickly fallout of the heavens. Merely to conceive such things makes them appear ridiculous. ~ Ptolemy

What a way Oak had, she thought, of enduring things. Boldwood, who seemed so much deeper and higher and stronger in feeling than Gabriel, had not yet learnt, any more than she herself, the simple lesson which Oak showed a mastery of by every turn and look he gave - that among the multitude of interests by which he was surrounded, those which affected his personal well-being were not the most absorbing and important in his eyes. Oak meditatively looked upon the horizon of circumstances without any special regard to his own standpoint in the midst. That was how she would wish to be ~ Thomas Hardy

Babies breathe a lot more rapidly than adults do, and what's more, they're also growing quickly and so they're absorbing lots more into the body and they're more fragile in terms of development and so on. ~ Francis Thompson

When the news of the creature broke, it was possible that the victims had attributed to the Monkeyman injuries that they had unknowingly inflicted on themselves in their sleep.

'It could be mass hysteria caused by mass media,' he concluded.

Dr. Desai's report lay on my desk for many days: a snap-shot of a city splintering under the strain of a fundamental urban reconfiguration- a city of the exhausted, distressed, and restless, struggling with the uncertainties of eviction and unemployment; a city of twenty million histrionic personas resiliently absorbing the day's glancing blows only to return home and tenderly claw themselves to sleep. ~ Aman Sethi

.... romance is so much bigger than just a love story. Romance has to do with making things lovely because of love. Romance means absorbing the beauty of life, conversation, atmosphere, places, and surroundings. It means increasing our awareness of the fragrance of pine trees, freshly ground coffee, and sheets drying on the line; hearing the music of waves, children's laughter, and he rain drumming on the roof: seeing the signature of God on His creation. It means drinking the gift of life to the dregs. All to be enjoyed, all to be taken in." p. 17 ~ Dee Brestin

The Three Little Pigs" is not the story that is fucking people up. Stories like "Say Anything" are fucking people up. We don't need to worry about people unconsciously "absorbing" archaic secret messages when they're six years old; we need to worry about all the entertaining messages people are consciously accepting when they're twenty-six. They're the ones that get us, because they're the ones we try to turn into life. ~ Chuck Klosterman

I studied art history and philosophy and took economics and political science classes. I just took whatever I wanted and I didn't worry about grades and I read and learned a lot, and I didn't have much of a social life, so it was deeply absorbing. ~ Sheila Heti

But she feared time itself, and read on Lady Bruton's face, as if it had been a dial cut in impassive stone, the dwindling of life; how year by year her share was sliced; how little the margin that remained was capable any longer of stretching, of absorbing, as in the youthful years, the colours, salts, tones of existence, so that she filled the room she entered, and felt often as she stood hesitating one moment on the threshold of her drawing-room, an exquisite suspense, such as might stay a diver before plunging while the sea darkens and brightens beneath him, and the waves which threaten to break, but only gently split their surface, roll and conceal and encrust ~ Virginia Woolf

Adapt what is useful, reject what is useless, and add what is specifically your own. ~ Bruce Lee

Plato found mathematics very absorbing because mathematical states never change. ~ Jostein Gaarder

Love lieth deep; Love dwells not in lip-depths;
Love laps his wings on either side the heart
Absorbing all the incense of sweet thoughts,
So that they pass not to the shrine of sound. ~ Alfred Lord Tennyson

Their gazes locked and held for a long beat, like maybe he was taking her pulse from across the room, absorbing the fact that she was drenched and breathless. The corners of his mouth twitched. She'd amused him again. ~ Jill Shalvis

Flying is an art of absorbing the information from more than one reference, primary and secondary, and then using this information to decide how to manipulate the controls to achieve a desired result. The altimeter is the secondary reference for determining if the nose attitude is correct. ~ Jerry Eichenberger

Borrowing and spending money never leads to prosperity or happiness. It is advisable to live within our means and avoid debt. Borrowing money is simply one method of deferring absorbing today's pain in exchange for repaying it with greater pain on a later day. Acceptance of a short period of discomfort is wiser than to mortgage a person's future. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Do not laugh! But once upon a time (my crest has long since fallen) I had a mind to make a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy-story – the larger founded on the lesser in contact with the earth, the lesser drawing splendour from the vast backcloths – which I could dedicate simply to: to England; to my country. It should possess the tone and quality that I desired, somewhat cool and clear, be redolent of our 'air' (the clime and soil of the North West, meaning Britain and the hither parts of Europe: not Italy or the Aegean, still less the East), and, while possessing (if I could achieve it) the fair elusive beauty that some call Celtic (though it is rarely found in genuine ancient Celtic things), it should be 'high', purged of the gross, and fit for the more adult mind of a land long now steeped in poetry. I would draw some of the great tales in fullness, and leave many only placed in the scheme, and sketched. The cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama. Absurd.

Of course, such an overweening purpose did not develop all at once. The mere stories were the thing. They arose in my mind as 'given' things, and as they came, separately, so too the links grew. An absorbing, though continually interrupted labour (especially since, even apart from the necessities of life, the mind would wing to the other pole and spen ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

Most people are great at absorbing information. Guerrilla marketing is needed because it gives small businesses a delightfully unfair advantage: certainty in an uncertain world, economy in a high-priced world, simplicity in a complicated world, marketing awareness in a clueless world. ~ Jay Conrad Levinson

Sex, a great and mysterious motive force in human life, has indisputably been a subject of absorbing interest to mankind through the ages. ~ William J. Brennan Jr.

What we shall desire for individuals is now clear: strong creative impulses, overpowering and absorbing the instinct of possession; reverence for others; respect for the fundamental creative impulse in ourselves. A certain kind of self-respect or native pride is necessary to a good life; a man must not have a sense of utter inward defeat if he is to remain whole, but must feel the courage and the hope and the will to live by the best that is in him, whatever outward or inward obstacles it may encounter. So far as it lies in a man's own power, his life will realize its best possibilities if it has three things: creative rather than possessive impulses, reverence for others, and respect for the fundamental impulse in himself. ~ Bertrand Russell

Because our lungs regularly deal with carbon dioxide, they see nothing wrong with absorbing its cousin, SiO2, which can be fatal. Many dinosaurs might have died this way when a metropolis-sized asteroid or comet struck the earth 65 million years ago. ~ Sam Kean

When you want a thing deeply, earnestly and intensely, this feeling of desire reinforces your will and arouses in you the determination to work for the desired object. ~ Grenville Kleiser

When you've always worked hard in the theater, you find that when you stop playing at the end of a run, the evenings seem very long indeed. You have to find something to keep yourself occupied because you're so used to gearing yourself up for that 8 O'clock curtain that to find any kind of really absorbing alternative is impossible . Nobody is as interesting to spend an evening with as a really good part. ~ Rex Harrison

No Mr. West, it was not a choice
New children's chapter book disputes the notion that 400 years of slavery was a result of "mental imprisonment"

Cleveland, OH, - .In the words of the great Stan Lee, "With great power, comes great responsibility." When icons make erroneous statements, often they do so with out recognizing the long reaching effects their thoughtless statements may have. When Kanye West made his very controversial statements regarding slavery, describing it as a choice, an entire generation of young minds were watching and absorbing as inaccurate picture of history was painted for them and presented as fact. Author Michelle Person, former teacher, elementary school principal, and founder of Just Like Me Books (JLM) could not stand by and allow that fallacy to linger unchecked. Committed to promoting a love of reading and increasing literacy rates among high risk readers through an interactive platform that prominently features characters of color, JLM's newest release Leaders of the Revolution tells the story of Toussaint L'Ouverture and the first successful slave uprising in the western world.

The third book in the Nathaniel English series, aimed at children ages 6-11, follows 5th grade Nathaniel as he searches for solutions to his present day problems by learning about important historical figures of the past. Thanks to his mother's extensive at home library, Nathaniel is exposed to information that his teachers don't share, helpin ~ Michelle Person

Wild eyes were another sign. It is something I have seldom seen - the expression of an ecstatic state - though much is foolishly written of them, as if they grew like Jerusalem artichokes along the road. The eyes are black, right enough, whatever their normal color is; they are black because their perception is condensed to a coal, because the touch and taste and perfume of the lover, the outcry of a dirty word, a welcome river, have been reduced in the heat of passion to a black ash, and this unburnt residue of oxidation, this calyx, replaces the pupil so it no longer receives but sends, and every hair is on end, though perhaps only outspread on a pillow, and the nostrils are flared, mouth agape, cheeks sucked so the whole face seems as squeezed as a juiced fruit; I know, for once Lou went into that wildness while we were absorbing one another, trying to kiss, not merely forcefully, not the skull of our skeleton, but the skull and all the bones on which the essential self is hung, kiss so the shape of the soul is stirred too, that's what is called the ultimate French, the furtherest fuck, when a cock makes a concept cry out and climax; I know, for more than once, though not often, I shuddered into that other region, when a mouth drew me through its generosity into the realm of unravel, and every sensation lay extended as a lake, every tie was loosed, and the glue of things dissolved. I knew I wore the wild look then. The greatest gift you can give another human being is ~ William H. Gass

I bless the gods for not letting my education in rhetoric, poetry, and other literary studies come easily to me, and thereby sparing me from an absorbing interest in these subjects. ~ Marcus Aurelius

The story of a regeneration of convictions - can any story in the entire field of literature be more filled with thrilling and all-absorbing interest? ~ Lev Shestov

OLIVER DAVENANT did not merely read books. He snuffed them up, took breaths of them into his lungs, filled his eyes with the sight of the print and his head with the sound of words. Some emanation from the book itself poured into his bones, as if he were absorbing steady sunshine. The pages had personality. He was of the kind who cannot have a horrifying book in the room at night. He would, in fine weather, lay it upon an outside sill and close the window. Often Julia would see a book lying on his doormat.

As well as this, his reading led him in and out of love. At first, it was the picture of Alice going up on tiptoe to shake hands with Humpty Dumpty; then the little Fatima in his Arthur Rackham book, her sweet dusky face, the coins hanging on her brow, the billowing trousers and embroidered coat. Her childish face was alive with excitement as she put the key to the lock. "Don't!" he had once cried to her in loud agony.

In London, he would go every Saturday morning to the Public Library to look at a picture of Lorna Doone. Some Saturdays it was not there, and he would go home again, wondering who had borrowed her, in what kind of house she found herself that week-end. On his last Saturday, he went to say good-bye and the book was not there, so he sat down at a table to await its return. Just before the library was to be shut for lunch-time, he went to the shelf and kissed the two books which would lie on either side of his Lorna when she was returned an ~ Elizabeth Taylor

Virginity, like all monstrosities, possesses special riches and its own absorbing grandeur. Among the chaste, life forces are economized and thus gain in resistance and durability. ~ Honore De Balzac

The man with a cross no longer controls his destiny; he lost control when he picked up his cross. That cross immediately became to him an all-absorbing interest, an overwhelming interference. No matter what he may desire to do, there is but one thing he can do; that is, move on toward the place of crucifixion. ~ Aiden Wilson Tozer

Buddhism seeks after God with the largest conception it can find, the all-producing and all-absorbing One; Christianity seeks after God with the most elementary passion it can find - the craving for a father, the hunger that is as old as the hills. It turns the whole cry of a lost universe into the cry of a lost child. ~ G.K. Chesterton

I don't understand the modern educational system at all."
"Neither do I. We have to learn sewing and knitting and smocking. In Deportment, they make us walk around the room with a book on our heads."
Granddaddy said, "I find that actually reading the book is a much more effective way of absorbing. ~ Jacqueline Kelly

The Christian church has a long history of gradually absorbing scientific perspectives and new discoveries. It seems to me that, in fact, that has been one of the strengths of Christianity - it has ultimately had great flexibility in absorbing new information about the world that we get from science. ~ George Coyne

Suppose ... burglars had made entry into this ... [library]. Picture them seated here on this floor, pouring the light of their dark-lanterns over some books they found, and thus absorbing moral truths and getting moral uplift. The whole course of their lives would have been changed. As it was, they kept straight on in their immoral way and were sent to jail. For all I know, they may next be sent to Congress. ~ Mark Twain

After absorbing the news of today, one expects to face a world consisting entirely of strikes, crimes, power failures, broken water mains, stalled trains, school shutdowns, muggers, drug addicts, neo-Nazis, and rapists. The fact is that one can come home in the evening, on a lucky day, without having encountered more than one or two of these phenomena. ~ Barbara Tuchman

Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims, have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters."

"This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. In the light of these ideas, Negroes will be hunted at the North, and held and flogged at the South so long as they submit to those devilish outrages, and make no resistance, either moral or physical. Men may not get all they pay for in this world; but they must certainly pay for all they get. If we ever get free from the oppression ~ Frederick Douglass