Esther T Quotes

The Fates themselves grant us one or two places in our lives where the thread untwists and we can follow either one strand or the other. Better to know when and where those choices will come to us instead of being taken by surprise. "
"Why only one or two?" I asked, thinking of all the moments my life had already accumulated in which I'd chosen to follow a different path than the one most people would expect of me. "Why not say that every day lets me choose my own future?"
The priest chuckled. "What a gift you have for joking, Lady Helen! You know your future. You'll be Sparta's queen, living a life blessed by the gods. Your only surprises will be the name of your husband and whether your babies will be sons or daughters. You don't need to visit the Pythia. But your noble brothers will be heroes, making their own futures; heroes should know what awaits them."
"He's right, Helen," Castor said. "Polydeuces and I should know our fate."
Castor's fate? He didn't need an oracle to discover that; I could tell him exactly what it would be. The young priest's glib words were better than underground fumes for giving me a vision of what lay in store for both of my brothers: They were going to have their ears filled with flattery, then be persuaded to leave a rich gift at Apollo's shrine just to hear some poor girl babble riddles while she choked half to death on smoke. Then they'd made another offering just to have Apollo's priests translate the Pythia's wild words. ~ Esther M. Friesner

In technology, we spend so much time experimenting, fine-tuning, getting the absolute cheapest way to do something - so why aren't we doing that with social policy? ~ Esther Duflo

Little girl, who gave you permission to--Oh!" She bit off her words the moment that she noticed how well I was dressed, to say nothing of the two guards attending me. Her expression transformed from sour to sweet with stunning speed.
"Ah, noble lady, I see that you have a keen eye for quality," she cried. "You won't find better cloth anywhere in Delphi--warm in winter, light in summer, tightly woven, and proof against wind and rain. And just look at those colors!"
I did. They were all drab grays and browns. I held the first cloth up to the sunlight. If that was what she called a tight weave, so was a fishing net.
"I want a cloak," I told her, tossing the cloth aside. "Something long and heavy. It's for him." I nodded at Milo.
"Of course, just as you wish, I have exactly what you want, wait right here," she chattered. "I'll bring out the best I have, something worthy of the noble lord." She raised her hands to Milo in a gesture of reverence before ducking back into her house.
"'The noble lord'?" the tall guard repeated, incredulous. He and his companion snickered. Milo looked miserable.
"Ignore them," I told him, speaking low. "I promise you, before today is over, you'll be the one laughing at them. ~ Esther M. Friesner

I was the only swimmer in movies. Tarzan was long gone, and he couldn't have done them anyway; he could never have gotten into my bathing suit. ~ Esther Williams

Worrying is imagining that which you don't want. ~ Esther Hicks

I worry that I'll go down to the dock, and that my ship will have already come and gone. I'll miss my boat. And we say, another boat, another boat, another boat. You have no idea how many boats are coming to your dock. It's a steady stream, and it doesn't matter how many of them you've missed. ~ Esther Hicks

Don't leave hold of your common sense. Think about what you're doing and how the technology can enhance it. Don't think about technology first. ~ Esther Dyson

There isn't anything that I cannot be or do or have, and I have a huge Nonphysical staff that's ready to assist me, and I'm ready. ~ Esther Hicks

Make the best of where you are and do your best to line up your Energy from where you are, because any bit of struggle or any bit of regret only holds your cork under the water and doesn't allow you to connect with the Energy that would allow anything to improve. ~ Esther Hicks

Disassociation. It is a word I have heard before but never in reference to that mind trick I had used to cope. That trick isn't a figment of my imagination. It was real. It had a name. And if the coping mechanism was real, it means what I have experienced was real too. ~ Elizabeth Esther

I don't hold memories in my hand, but I'll never let them go. ~ Esther M. Friesner

Law of Attraction won't let you remove a thought. You cannot concentrate upon NOT thinking about something hard enough to stop thinking about it! For the more you decide you will not think about it, the more you think about it! ... Think about that. ~ Esther Hicks

What's going on, Helen?" Polydeuces came up behind us, followed closely by Castor. They'd been working hard down among the oarsmen again, and it was no pleasure to stand too near them on that windless day.
"The usual, from the look of things," Castor said, glancing at Milo's sagging body at the rail. He gave the boy an encouraging pat on the back. "Try to drink something, even if you can't keep your food down, lad," he said. "Shall I bring you a little watered wine?"
Milo lifted his sallow, haggard face and tried to thank my brother for his kindness but had to turn away quickly and spew over the side again.
Polydeuces sighed. "How can he still do that? I haven't seen him eat a bite of food since we boarded. You'd think his gut would be empty by now."
"Maybe it's a sacred mystery and only the gods know the answer," Castor said, smiling. "Like the horn of the she-goat who suckled the infant Zeus, the horn he broke off and blessed as soon as he was king of the gods so that it poured out a never-ending stream of food and drink."
"I always thought it was a strange way to thank the poor beast, breaking off one of her horns, Polydeuces said. "But it's not my place to question the gods." He, too, patted Milo's shivering back and added, "So, boy, how does it feel to be pouring out a never-ending stream of--?"
"Stop that!" I scowled at my brothers as I shooed them away from Milo. "How can you make such jokes in front of him?"
"To be honest, the only t ~ Esther M. Friesner

I always called her Star. I always called her Estee. And Grace was just the reminder we didn't want to forget that it's all about grace. It's all about the fact that we don't deserve these good things, but they're ours anyway, to enjoy and to share and to delight in. ~ Wayne Earl

Change means that what was before wasn't perfect. People want things to be better. ~ Esther Dyson

I personally like the certainty of death. It is amazingly relaxing to realize that one can't do everything. If I knew I were going to live forever, I would feel obligated to fix all my imperfections. I would have to learn many more languages; I would worry about my teeth not holding out; I would have to make amends for all the mistakes I have made. ~ Esther Dyson

No system in the world is so well-designed that it can't grow stale, rigid, or corrupted by those who benefit most from it. ~ Esther Dyson

In the vibration of appreciation all things come to you. You don't have to make anything happen. From what you are living, amplify the things you appreciate so that it sit he dominate vibration you are offering and then only those things that are a vibrational match to that can come to you. Then sit back and know, You ain't seen nothing yet!!! ~ Esther Hicks

Owning the intellectual property is like owning land: You need to keep investing in it again and again to get a payoff; you can't simply sit back and collect rent. ~ Esther Dyson

I can't get it wrong. ~ Esther Hicks

Kindness takes energy. If I say yes to everything, I don't have energy left to be kind. ~ Esther Hizsa

I always felt that if I made a movie, it would be one movie; I didn't see how they could make 26 swimming movies. ~ Esther Williams

If you can't do, you'd best shut up about it. ~ Esther Forbes

When you feel good, you're allowing good. When you don't feel good, you are not allowing good. ~ Esther Hicks

On some level we trade passion for security, that's trading one illusion for another. It's a matter of degree. We can't live in constant fear, but we can't live without any. The fear of loss is essential to love. ~ Esther Perel

Giving more to women will, to some extent, come at the expense of men. People sometimes try to sweep that under the rug by saying you will create so much additional resources that everyone will be better off. I don't think that's true. ~ Esther Duflo

This trip would be a lot easier if we had weapons bearers coming with us," he grumbled, toeing his waiting pile of belongings. He looked rumpled, red-eyed, and hurting, not much of a surprise after all he'd had to drink the previous night. "You'd think every lad in Delphi would jump at the chance to join us on a fabulous quest like this."
"We'll have weapons bearers when we reach our quest's start at Iolkos," Polydeuces told him. "Maybe before. We'll pass through many cities before we reach Iolkos. Jason hasn't completed his crew yet."
"I still don't see why we can't find any now," Castor persisted. "It's a fine opportunity for any boy would hopes to be a warrior someday. They can't all have kinsmen to teach them about the warrior's life and how to fight. We'd see to it that they learn how to use the sword and spear and shield they carry for us."
"You don't have shields," I pointed out.
"We'll get them in Iolkos!" Castor snapped, then winced and cradled his head tenderly in one hand. "Just as well I don't have a shield yet: If that scrawny boy'd had the sense to become my weapons bearer, the weight of it would've crushed him."
"What scrawny boy?" I asked.
"Someone with no stomach for adventure, that's all," Polydeuces said, resting one hand on my shoulder. "Not like us, eh, Helen? ~ Esther M. Friesner

The honeymoon phase is special in that it brings together the relief of reciprocated love with the excitement of a future still to be created. What we often don't realize is that the exuberance of the beginning is fueled by its undercurrent of uncertainty. We set out to make love more secure and dependable, but in the process, inevitably we dial down its intensity. On the path of commitment, we happily trade a little passion for a bit more certainty, some excitement for some stability. ~ Esther Perel

We can't all win Olympic medals. Even I never won one. ~ Esther Williams

I dislike the phrase 'Internet friends,' because it implies that people you know online aren't really your friends, that somehow the friendship is less real or meaningful to you because it happens through Skype or text messages. The measure of a friendship is not its physicality but its significance.
(John Green-Introduction) ~ Esther Earl

Everything that we want is downstream ... And you don't have even have to turn the boat and paddle downstream, just let go of the oars, the current will carry you. ~ Esther Hicks

Bringing back the Golden Fleece," I repeated, mocking him. "As if it exists."
Castor frowned. "What's biting you? Of course it exists! We told you what Jason said. It belonged to a marvelous ram sent by the gods to rescue two royal children, Phrixus and Helle, from their murderous stepmother. A pity it wasn't a perfect rescue. Phrixus reached Colchis safely, but his sister, Helle, fell off in mid-flight and drowned. Jason says that's why the place where she plunged into the sea's called the Hellespont. If that doesn't prove the story's true, what will satisfy you?"
"Anyone can give a place a name," I said, rolling my eyes. "When I get home, I'll name that olive grove near our training ground Wolf Forest and see what happens. A ram with a fleece of real gold, a flying ram that could carry the children through the skies to Colchis, where there are dragons, oh yes, that's believable! That's worth risking your lives for on a voyage across the world! I'll bet you don't care if that story's true or not. You just want an excuse to go off chasing fame!"
Polydeuces set a honey cake on my already heaping plate. "There must be something waiting for us in Colchis, little sister," he said gently. "Maybe not the gold fleece of a flying ram, but something. Why would Jason go to the trouble and expense of outfitting a ship for such a long, dangerous voyage otherwise?" He smiled wistfully and added, "You mustn't worry about us. We'll come back; we'll be fine."
He was right ~ Esther M. Friesner

If man understood that "what I create has nothing to do with what anybody else is creating" then he wouldn't be so afraid of what others are doing. ~ Esther Hicks

It was said with humor, but the criticism wasn't lost on Gamache. He was fishing, and he knew it. So did Sommes. So did Esther. We're all fishermen, she'd said. ~ Louise Penny

If we don't see to it that our children turn out better than we did, what will become of the world? ~ Esther M. Friesner

Mother?" I rested one hand on the doorpost, with its carved pattern of palm branches. "Mother, will you teach me how to hunt?"
She gave me a strange look. "Gladly. But why?"
"Because if I do choose to go back to the training ground and Father finds out and wants me to stop, I want to bring him a whole cauldron of stewed rabbit so he'll change his mind."
When Mother stopped laughing, she took me outside, off into the olive grove, and gave me my first archery lesson. I didn't hit anything, but as Mother told me (with a perfectly straight face), I did manage to scare the olives off a couple of trees. ~ Esther M. Friesner

I don't have a belief problem, I have a focusing weakness. I focus on what's loudest instead of what feels best. ~ Esther Hicks

When the desire is born, right away you start counting yourselves a failure, because you've got this desire that hasn't been satisfied. Know that you never get it done! And since you never get it done, it's time to stop being unhappy about what's undone, because most of it is undone! You are an eternal being. Most of it is undone. Instead of taking score about what's been achieved - we want you to start feeling anticipation about what is still to arrive. ~ Esther Hicks

This is a noble's dagger," Milo said. "It's not for me." He turned his face to me. "But I'll carry it if it will please you, Lady Helen."
Milo's declaration made Eunike cover her mouth and do a bad job of smothering a snicker. I didn't mind so much. I was glad to see her cheerful again.
"Instead of wasting time making fun of me, why don't we get started?" I said. "It'll be dawn before you know it."
"Not before I know it," said Eunike. We all laughed at that. ~ Esther M. Friesner

Stella's?"
"It's a restaurant called Bella Stella in Little Italy."
He frowned. "On Mulberry Street."
"You know it?" That didn't surprise me. It was a pretty famous place.
"Of course I know it, Esther. There've been two mob hits there in the
past five years, and Stella Butera launders money for the Gambello crime
family."
Okay, so it was notorious as well as famous. ~ Laura Resnick

So the big question is, "Well, do I just dump all those unwanted things and try to start fresh?" And we say, no. You just set the Tone, where you are, by looking for things to appreciate. And by setting your Tone in a very clear deliberate way, anything that doesn't match it gravitates out of your experience, and anything that does match it gravitates into your experience. It is so much simpler than most of you are allowing yourself to believe. ~ Esther Hicks

My deepest regrets, Lady Helen, but your slave cannot be lodged here with you."
"Milo is free," I said sternly, standing very tall. "He serves us very well, and my brothers and I need him with us. It's not going to insult Apollo's ability to protect me if he stays. He's no guard."
"So I see." The priest gave Milo a patronizing look. "Gracious Lady Helen, how kind of you to tell me what will or won't insult the god I've served since childhood. ~ Esther M. Friesner

If you haven't done something amazing, don't forget to try. the worst that can happen is you fail, and then you can just try again until you succeed. those words don't work on me now, but just try to remember them ~ Esther Earl

In committed sex, in marriage, people don't feel the need to seduce or to build anticipation - - that's an effort they think they no longer need to do now that they have conquered their partner. If they're in the mood, their partner should be too. ~ Esther Perel

Good energy, even if it's not focused. Bad technique, but that's understandable and it can be corrected. Too much enthusiasm. There's no shame in honorable combat, but there shouldn't be so much unnatural pleasure. The man with the greatest thirst for blood ends up drinking at Hades's table. ~ Esther M. Friesner

And the Russians certainly don't have it. If a woman shows up in a fur coat, I just assume she's a crook. And that's me, the nice American. The assumption that you can't make money honestly is a killer. ~ Esther Dyson

When you take the problems of the world on your shoulders, your body doesn't feel good. It's just that simple. Leave the problems of the world to the individual problem-makers of the world, and you be the joy-seeker that you are. ~ Esther Hicks

All throughout Torah, we find people looking for God, and not finding God, because God doesn't often conform to our expectations. God is somewhere other than the place we think to look. And our sages show that you can respond to God's hiddenness in many different ways. You can, like the writer of Lamentations, respond to God's hiddenness by mourning. Or, like the writer of Ecclesiastes, instead of asking where the God you thought you were looking for had gone, ask what God is like now. Or you can respond to God's hiddenness by being like Esther: if God is hiding, then you must act on God's behalf. If you look around the world and wonder where God has gone, why God isn't intervening on behalf of just and righteous causes, your very wondering may be a nudge to work in God's stead. ~ Lauren F. Winner

Why, Esther wonders, do any of us believe our lives lead outward through time? How do we know we aren't continually traveling inward, toward our centers? Because this is how it feels to Esther when she sits on her deck in Geneva, Ohio, in the last spring of her life; it feels as if she is being drawn down some path that leads deeper inside, toward a miniature, shrouded, final kingdom that has waited within her all along. ~ Anthony Doerr

Now, lying on my back in bed, I imagined Buddy saying, 'Do you know what a poem is, Esther?'
'No, what?' I would say.
'A piece of dust.'
Then just as he was smiling and starting to look proud, I would say, 'So are the cadavers you cut up. So are the people you think you're curing. They're dust as dust as dust. I reckon a good poem lasts a whole lot longer than a hundred of those people put together.'
And of course Buddy wouldn't have any answer to that, because what I said was true. People were made of nothing so much as dust, and I couldn't see that doctoring all that dust was a bit better than writing poems people would remember and repeat to themselves when they were unhappy or sick and couldn't sleep. ~ Sylvia Plath

I want to make a difference, to help someone. And I don't know how. ~ Esther Earl

Moses prayed and the Lord parted the Red Sea. Joshua prayed and the walls of Jericho fell. David prayed and God protected him from Saul. Esther prayed and the lives of the children of Israel were saved. Daniel prayed and the Lord closed the lion's mouths. Jesus prayed in the garden until He was ready to face Calvary. I don't think any of those prayers were "Now I lay me down to sleep". ~ Clay Wallace

If there is something that you have to do, resist the temptation to do it under duress. Ask yourself, "What's the worst thing that would happen if I didn't do this?" And if you can get away with not doing it at all, don't do it. And then imagine what would it feel like to have this done. Spend a day or two, if you can, just 15 minutes here, 5 minutes here, 2 minutes here, here and here, imagining it completed in a way that pleases you! And then, the next time you decide that you're going to take action about it, the action is going to be a whole lot easier. ~ Esther Hicks

Modern relationships are cauldrons of contradictory longings: safety and excitement, grounding and transcendence, the comfort of love and the heat of passion We want it all, and we want it with one person. Reconciling the domestic and the erotic is a delicate balancing act that we achieve intermittently at best. It requires knowing your partner while remaining open to the unknown, cultivating intimacy that respects privacy. Separateness and togetherness alternate, or proceed in counterpoint. Desire resists confinement, and commitment mustn't swallow freedom whole. ~ Esther Perel

In the sense that people who produce things and work get rewarded, statistically. You don't get rewarded precisely for your effort, but in Russia you got rewarded for being alive, but not very well rewarded. ~ Esther Dyson

I kept getting up earlier and earlier, hoping to escape before Ione could catch me. That was how I learned that you can't get up earlier than a farmer's wife. ~ Esther M. Friesner

I lied to you,' she said, hanging her head in shame, 'more than once. In fact, I swore that my lies were truth. I can't understand how it could have happened. It just came out of my mouth and by the time I realised what I'd done, it was too late.
'It's never too late to realise that you were mistaken, Sophiel. ~ A.O. Esther

I Love you so much, I don't care what you think. ~ Esther Hicks

When you say "Yes" to something, you include something you do want in your experience. When you say "No" to something, you include something you don't want in your experience. ~ Esther Hicks

Dyson's Law: Do ask; don't lie. ~ Esther Dyson

All those statistics that you are gathering about your own experiences and about others are only about how somebody has flowed Energy. It isn't about any hard fast reality. ~ Esther Hicks

Acceptance doesn't mean predictability. Sex isn't always for 11 at night - - it's also 'meet at a hotel room at noon'. What you feel during dating can exist at home, if you don't suffocate it. ~ Esther Perel

As she fell, Esther wasn't worried about being blown off course and plummeting into the rocks below. She wasn't worried about hitting the shallows and pin diving to the ocean floor and shattering her spine. She wasn't even worried about Cthulhu. (Okay, maybe a little.) What she worried about was Eugene's willingness to jump. The way he glanced down at the water far below and looked at it like it was home. The way he stepped lightly from the cliff's edge, and the way he fell through the air faster than she did, dragged down by earth's magnetic field. The way he flickered in the sunlight as he hit the water, the same way Tyler Durden flashed on-screen four times before you saw him solidly. Foreshadowing the twist to come. Eugene was afraid of demons, and monsters, and above all the dark, but he was not afraid of death. That scared her more than anything. ~ Krystal Sutherland

If you are ending up where you want to be, what difference does it make whether you went fast or slow? Or what difference does it make whether it was painful before it got really good? Isn't that the point of free will? You get to choose. ~ Esther Hicks

This was the time when all we could talk about was sentences, sentences - nothing else stirred us. Whatever happened in those days, whatever befell our regard, Clea and I couldn't rest until it had been converted into what we told ourselves were astonishingly unprecedented and charming sentences:
"Esther's cleavage is something to be noticed" or "You can't have a contemporary prison without contemporary furniture" or "I envision an art which will make criticism itself seem like a cognitive symptom, one which its sufferers define to themselves as taste but is in fact nothing of the sort" or "I said I want my eggs scrambled not destroyed."
At the explosion of such a sequence from our green young lips, we'd rashly scribble it on the wall of our apartment with a filthy wax pencil, or type it twenty-five times on the same sheet of paper and then photocopy the paper twenty-five times and then slice each page into twenty-five slices on the paper cutter in the photocopy shop and then scatter the resultant six hundred and twenty-five slips of paper throughout the streets of our city, fortunes without cookies. ~ Jonathan Lethem

I used to think that unconditional love meant loving someone who wronged me. I never thought it could mean loving someone who is not so easy to like or doesn't make me feel good. ~ Esther Hizsa

Sometimes you walk into things, that, if you were paying attention, vibrationally, you would know right from the beginning that it wasn't what you are wanting. In most cases, your initial knee-jerk response was a pretty good indicator of how it was going to turn out later. The things that give most of you the most grief are those things that initially you had a feeling response about, but then you talked yourself out of it for one reason or another. ~ Esther Hicks

I think it's so funny when people think they can't control a movie star. They can. We're just women, you know. ~ Esther Williams

It's not that you have jobs on the Internet, but the Internet makes it possible for more people to build their own jobs. What it does is, it erodes the power of institutions. It used to be you needed an institution to have a job. But, if you look at people, I don't think any of us is really employed by an institution. We run our own lives. ~ Esther Dyson

Doesn't your work interest you, Esther?
You know, Esther, you've got the perfect setup of a true neurotic.
You'll never get anywhere like that, you'll never get anywhere like that, you'll never get anywhere like that. ~ Sylvia Plath

The mom doesn't become sexy; the woman does. You have to retrieve the woman from the mother. And she may need to separate to do that: a bath, a walk. She must cordon off an erotic space. ~ Esther Perel

Tell everyone you know: "My happiness depends on me, so you're off the hook." And then demonstrate it. Be happy, no matter what they're doing. Practice feeling good, no matter what. And before you know it, you will not give anyone else responsibility for the way you feel-and then, you'll love them all. Because the only reason you don't love them, is because you're using them as your excuse to not feel good. ~ Esther Hicks

I sent a messenger to the inn where they're staying," he told us. "They'll look after you while Castor and I are with the Pythia. Have a good time in Delphi." He acted as though he'd just solved every problem in the world.
I didn't see it that way.
As we crossed the temple grounds together, I asked Polydeuces, "Is there a good reason you're treating me like a silly sheep?" I indicated the two soldiers behind me. "Or are you embarrassing me like this just because you can?"
Castor spoke up before his twin could answer. "Stop making a fuss over nothing, Helen. These men will protect you, not steer you."
"That's right, Lady Helen," the taller of the two said. "We're your shadows, not your sheepdogs. Go anywhere you want."
I gave him a sweet, innocent smile. Then I barked at him. ~ Esther M. Friesner

Take your Inner Being everywhere you go. If you take your Inner Being to the party, it's going to be a good party! If you take your Inner Being, the food that you eat will be received perfectly by the cells of your body. Every word that comes out of your mouth will be beneficial to everyone who hears them with their ears - or with their vibration. Don't go anywhere without your Inner Being. That's what "Allowing" is. Always having your Inner Being present. And then, anything else that happens is always orchestrated perfectly by Law of Attraction. ~ Esther Hicks

While much has been written about the aggressive manifestations of male sexuality, it is not sufficiently appreciated that the erotic realm also offers men a restorative experience for their more tender side. The body is our original mother tongue, and for a lot of men it remains the only language of closeness that hasn't been spoiled. Through sex, men can recapture the pure pleasure of connection without having to compress their hard-to-articulate needs into the prison of words. ~ Esther Perel

In the stories of faith I grew up with, men were allowed a full range of emotion: King David, who calls on God to destroy his enemies. Absalom rising up against his father the king. Jonah stewing under his tree, looking out on the city God saved but he hates. Job crying out to God for his miserable fate.

But the rage of good women in the Bible is all in the subtext. Nowhere is there an Eve angry for being removed from Eden and the loss of her two sons. Where is Esther, where is her horror and pain watching the genocide of her people? Or Ruth, who followed her miserable mother-in-law to a foreign land and had to listen to that lady bitching as if she felt nothing?

The women allowed to have feelings in the Bible are always the villains. Michal sneering at David that he ought to put his clothes on and stop dancing like a naked fool. She is indicted for her words, but hadn't she just been married, abandoned, and then taken back by this man? Used as a political pawn, then ignored for Bathsheba. Then there is Sarah, who beat her maidservant Hagar, blaming her for what should have rightly fallen on the shoulders of Abraham. And Job's wife, who Biblical scholars condemn for telling her husband to curse God and die. But wasn't she just wishing him a swift end to the suffering that they had walked through hand in hand? ~ Lyz Lenz

...this is the first time in the history of humankind where we are trying to experience sexuality in the long term, not because we want 14 children, for which we need to have even more because many of them won't make it, and not because it is exclusively a woman's marital duty. This is the first time that we want sex over time about pleasure and connection that is rooted in desire.

So what sustains desire, and why is it so difficult? And at the heart of sustaining desire in a committed relationship, I think is the reconciliation of two fundamental human needs...

So reconciling our need for security and our need for adventure into one relationship, or what we today like to call a passionate marriage, used to be a contradiction in terms. Marriage was an economic institution in which you were given a partnership for life in terms of children and social status and succession and companionship. But now we want our partner to still give us all these things, but in addition I want you to be my best friend and my trusted confidant and my passionate lover to boot, and we live twice as long. So we come to one person, and we basically are asking them to give us what once an entire village used to provide:

Give me belonging, give me identity, give me continuity, but give me transcendence and mystery and awe all in one.
Give me comfort, give me edge.
Give me novelty, give me familiarity.
Give me predictability, give me surprise.
And we ~ Esther Perel

The truth didn't dawn on me. The truth is an early riser and when I finally blinked awake, it was glaring. ~ Esther Schor

I certainly don't have any interest in being on a dark veranda with any man except my husband, unlike some women do. - Esther Norman ~ Barry Gray

What's the point of opening yourself up to your friends if they don't notice you in your vulnerable state? The point of it all is to love friends completely and utterly, at their best and worst, and to love more than just the good things. It's about showing that you're willing to accept them for whatever they are, that they should not feel insecure or self-conscious in your presence, which can be a hard task to achieve. ~ Esther Earl

Do you know what a poem is, Esther?'
No, what?' I would say.
A piece of dust.'
Then, just as he was smiling and starting to look proud, I would say, 'So are the cadavers you cut up. So are the people you think you're curing. They're dust as dust as dust. I reckon a good poem lasts a whole lot longer than a hundred of those people put together.'
And of course Buddy wouldn't have any answer to that, because what I said was true. People were made of nothing so much as dust, and I couldn't see that doctoring all that dust was a bit better than writing poems people would remember and repeat to themselves when they were unhappy or sick or couldn't sleep. ~ Sylvia Plath

I don't play Hollywood maids, the hee-hee kind of people who are so in love with their madam's children they have no time for their own. ~ Esther Rolle

But life is beautiful, Sariel!' Gabriel said, trying to convince him. 'Watch the sunrise sometime lying in the scented flowers of the field, or the shooting stars at the end of summer! Read a couple of really exciting books or lose yourself in the unselfconscious smiles of children. Have a swim in a clear mountain lake or take a run among trees clothed in autumn colours. If you can see the good in Earth, your own existence will become the richer for it!'
'That all sounds very well and good, but you haven't convinced me,' the deep-voiced angel murmured and Ariel laughed.
'My friend, Gabriel was very gently trying to suggest that you should fall in love and that will better dispose you to the world! ~ A.O. Esther

You know what happens to sex in marriage? Instead of inviting desire, you monitor it. Especially men: You let her sleep late, you take the kids to the park, and all that time you're thinking, "Tonight I'll get some." That doesn't work. ~ Esther Perel

It has struck me that people seldom listen to the meaning of underlying words.There are only a few people who recognize the silence beyond the scream,the gentle weeping that hides beyond tough statements.They hear only the words,the sentences,when there is so much more to take in.People who are too self-absorbed to notice,really see or fathom others.
Often,they don't even know themselves. ~ Esther Verhoef

Esther was more man than most men I know, myself included. Many of us - men and women - are extremely passive and cowardly. We don't take risks for God because we are obsessed with safety, security, and most of all, with the future. ~ Kevin DeYoung

If you've got somebody's aspects in your experience that you don't like, there's only one reason they're there. You keep evoking them with your attention to them. Without knowing about Law of Attraction, you have - through your old habit of observation - achieved vibrational harmony with the parts of them that you do not like, and you keep summoning those parts from them by your constant vibrational offering of them. ~ Esther Hicks

A story needs rhythm. Read it aloud to yourself. If it doesn't spin a bit of magic, it's missing something. ~ Esther Freud

You can't take sides against anything. If you would just be one who is for things, you would live happily ever after. If you could just leave the "against" part out. ~ Esther Hicks

What are you so afraid of?"
"Nothing!" He yelled so fiercely that a pair of oxen grazing in a nearby field snorted and moved farther away from us. It was the first time I ever saw fire in Milo's eyes. "I'm no coward. That's not why I wouldn't go with your brothers. I have to go with you."
"Who said so? You're free now, Milo. Don't you know what that means? You can come and go anywhere you like. You ought to appreciate it."
"I appreciate you, Lady Helen!" Once Milo raised his voice, he couldn't stop. He shouted so loudly that the two oxen trotted to the far side of the pasture as fast as they could move their massive bodies. "You're the one who gave me my freedom. If I love to be fifty, I'll never be able to repay you! ~ Esther M. Friesner

This time, I sat next to a pixie girl called Takara, who had pinkish hair and wore a bright pink dress to match. She was the first forest-dweller I had seen wearing jewellery: she was wearing a necklace and bracelet of finely worked crystal beads. When she noticed my interest, she removed her bracelet and held it out to me.
"Sophiel, I would be so pleased if you would wear this!"
I was surprised by this kind and very selfless gesture; after all, I had not been admiring her jewels with any intention of asking her to part with them!
"You're very kind, Takara, but I was merely admiring your handiwork!" I said, trying politely to refuse her gift. "Mitsuko told me that you make your jewellery yourself. You're very talented, they're really lovely pieces, but I wouldn't want to take them away from you. It's you that makes these jewels really beautiful! ~ A.O. Esther

I think I have the right to know what Steve Forbes paid in taxes - I don't think there should be a law. I think there should be a presumption. I wouldn't vote for a guy who wouldn't reveal what he paid in taxes. That kind of thing. ~ Esther Dyson

'Hollywood maids' are so idiotic. They grin at everything. I told Norman Lear I didn't want to play a maid because of that 'hee-hee/grin-grin' attitude, and he said, 'Who said I wanted that?' He told me he wanted two strong women that are the black and white of the same coin. I said, 'Oh, well - in that case, I'll be right there!' ~ Esther Rolle

What I didn't say was that each time I picked up a German dictionary or a German book, the very sight of those dense, black, barbed-wire letters made my mind shut like a clam. ~ Sylvia Plath

I do hope that when the day comes, whether in 1, 10, or 100 years, I don't want you to think of me and feel sad. ~ Esther Earl

Be as happy as you want to be in a world gone mad. Be as safe as you want to be in a world that is afraid of everything. Be as healthy as you want to be in a world that is mostly sick. Don't let the statistics that someone else created affect you. ~ Esther Hicks

I'm glad to take on the role of a domestic because many of your black leaders, your educators, your professionals came from domestic parents who made sacrifices to see that their children didn't go through what they did. ~ Esther Rolle

I like music, indie stuff, but I don't like liking music that other people like. ~ Esther Earl

Laying a good foundation in all you do secures the future because when the storm comes it will definitely trouble you but you won't fall.
Regards
Esther ~ Esther Samson

She wipes her forehead with her wrist
She's just back from a double shift
Esther's a carer
doing nights

Behind her
on the kitchen wall
is a black and white picture
of swallows in flight

Her eyes are sore
her muscles ache
she cracks a beer
and swigs it

She holds it
to her thirsty lips
and necks it
till it's finished.

It's 4:18 a.m. again.
Her brain is full
of all she's done that day
She knows
that she won't sleep a wink
before the sun
is on it's way.

She's worried about the world tonight.

She's worried all the time.
She don't know how
she's supposed
to put it

from her mind . . .

- Europe is Lost ~ Kae Tempest