Laypeople Are Called Quotes

It has taken me much of my life to begin to get to the second gaze. By nature I have a critical mind and a demanding heart, and I am so impatient. These are both my gifts and my curses, as you might expect. Yet I cannot have one without the other, it seems. I cannot risk losing touch with either my angels or my demons. They are both good teachers.

I am convinced that guilt and shame are never from God. They are merely the defenses of the False Self as it is shocked at its own poverty - the defenses of a little man who wants to be a big man. God leads by compassion toward the soul, never by condemnation. If God would relate to us by severity and punitiveness, God would only be giving us permission to do the same (which is tragically, due to our mistaken images of God, exactly what has happened!).

God offers us, instead, the grace to "weep" over our sins more than to ever perfectly overcome them, to humbly recognize our littleness. (St. Thérèse of Lisieux brought this Gospel message home in our time.) The spiritual journey is a kind of weeping and a kind of wandering that keeps us both askew and thus awake at the same time. Thérèse called it her "little way."

So now in my later life, contemplation and compassion are finally coming together. This is my second gaze. It is well worth waiting for, because only the second gaze sees fully and truthfully. It sees itself, the other, and even God with God's own eyes, which are always eyes of compassio ~ Richard Rohr

Life is like a game of chess. To win you have to make a move. Knowing which move to make comes with IN-SIGHT and knowledge, and by learning the lessons that are acculated along the way. We become each and every piece within the game called life! ~ Alan Rufus

I do think novels are overlooked. I did write one some years ago that I think is quite good, called 'The End of the Story,' not to blow my own horn. ~ Lydia Davis

Oh, one of the things that I am most proud of is that people can say, "I am an atheist," in the United States today, without being called a Communist atheist, or an atheist Communist. I separated those two words. I think that's probably the best thing that I did. The other thing is, of course, that we are developing something that we call "modern atheism," or "American atheism," which is entirely different from the materialism of the Greek philosophers. What we are interested in is moving out, in order to see that there is a more viable life cycle for all people, and that the human condition can be ameliorated somewhat by human beings working in concert to do something. We must do something about the pollution. We must do something about the waste. We have to do something about the greed. We must stop war. And we're not going to do any of those things as long as we feel the solution is to go to church on Sunday, or funnel our energy into prayer or religious solutions. Everybody has to get mixed up in the problems, to try to solve them. ~ Madalyn Murray O'Hair

The person smokes pot. Little alcohol, no hard drugs, but more than an occasional toke - although never while working: only at home, before bed. "Are you sure it shows up in your blood?" I asked, innocently. Ha. I'm an authority now. It stays in your bloodstream for six weeks. I called the executive producer, who said: "That can't be what they're testing for. It must be hard drugs." Ironically, though, if you're a cokehead or a heroin addict, relax: Those things go right out of you, a few days and they're gone. And you can also be the biggest alcoholic on the planet, but they won't test for that. ~ Christine Vachon

Hutch called into the semidarkness of The Shed. 'Somebody's coming, Heck!'
Then he, with the rest, faded from sight with that uncanny quickness known only to creatures of the wild and young children who are, after all, also creatures of the wild.
("The Shed") ~ E. Everett Evans

Everyone has to deal with the hand that they are dealt with in the poker game called Life. ~ Hannah Andronic

The tires are called wets, because they're used in the wet. And these tires are called slicks, because they're very slick. ~ Murray Walker

Why sacrifice some for the benefit of others? It's generally the best and the bravest who choose to lay down their lives for the sake of those who hide in their holes. So why favor the sacrifice of the righteous in order to permit the less righteous to survive them? Don't you think that's a way of weakening the human species? What's going to be left of it in a few generations if it's always the best who are called upon to exit the scene so that the cowards, the counterfeits, the charlatans, and the pricks can continue to proliferate like rats? ~ Yasmina Khadra

...first, in order to remember, something must be forgotten; second, the place where memories are stored has no boundaries. In other words, forgetting is a twin; its tandem effect is best called "simultancous" distraction, the instant when one memory defoliates another. This fuzzy double - one devouring the other - presumably inhibits learning ~ Norman Klein

He's more family to Gabe than you are," Raffi said, all calm and reason. "And, as I told Audrey, you have no rights in this situation. At all. She has power of attorney. And, so you know, I called security on you about three minutes ago, told them you were causing a scene in a coma patient's room. Might want to leave before they get here. Don't want to publicly tarnish those shiny halos of yours. ~ Tonya Burrows

What I think is that a good life is one hero journey after another. Over and over again, you are called to the realm of adventure, you are called to new horizons. Each time, there is the same problem: do I dare? And then if you do dare, the dangers are there, and the help also, in the fulfillment or the fiasco. ~ Joseph Campbell

We kissed for two hours. Eventually, I led him into my bedroom and pulled off both of our shirts. He stopped me.
"This might sound weird; it's not typical guy response." I froze, suddenly awkward. "I mean, if I didn't feel the way I do with you I would be all for it, but I kind of think maybe it would be good to wait. I've rushed into sex, and had it be a mistake." He shrugged apologetically. "I mean, if it's safe to assume you are experiencing the same date that I am, then I think we will have time."
I was a little flabbergasted and more than a little embarrassed. How could I explain that the idea sounded like a huge relief to me, that I didn't quite understand where the impulse to start taking my clothes off came from? I had had the same experience. I rarely enjoyed first-time sex with partners, largely because I usually did it before I really knew or trusted them. Here was where the difference between what I knew and did remained wide. The shame I felt wash over me was tinged with that hatred of my own innocence. Was I still so green? So unconfident? Had I gone straight out of the extremity of sex work to the innocence of my adolescence? Where was my self-knowledge? Still, I was relieved.
"Of course. I agree totally." I clutched my T-shirt to my chest and smiled at him. "And yes, I am on the same date you are on."
"I thought so," he said. "I mean, I don't think you can feel like this when it's not reciprocal."
He left at 2:00 A.M. and called me at ~ Melissa Febos

The agency was started by the tribe's economic development corporation, in an effort to diversify from its gambling casino called "WinnaVegas." You read this right: Plains Indians publishing Arabic brochures for Nebraskans who are importing machinery from Koreans to be customized by a South Sioux City company for customers in Kuwait. ~ Thomas L. Friedman

What if there was something essentially wrong with Claude Sylvanshine that wasn't wrong with other people? What if he was simple ill-suited, the way some people are born without limbs or certain organs? The neurology of failure. What if he was simply born and destined to live in the shadow of Total Fear and Despair, and all his so-called activities were pathetic attempts to distract him from the inevitable? ~ David Foster Wallace

Those terrifying verbal jungles called laws are simply such directives, accumulated, codified, and systematized through the centuries. ~ S.I. Hayakawa

Our task is to implement Jesus' unique achievement. We are like the musicians called to play and sing the unique and once-only-written musical score. We don't have to write it again, but we have to play it. Or, in the image Paul uses in I Corinthians 3, we are now in the position of young architects discovering a wonderful foundation already laid by a master architect and having to work out what sort of building was intended. ~ N. T. Wright

But then in what way are things called good? They do not seem to be like the things that only chance to have the same name. Are goods one then by being derived from one good or by all contributing to one good, or are they rather one by analogy? Certainly as sight is in the body, so is reason in the soul, and so on in other cases. ~ Aristotle.

A lot of nonsense is spoken at funerals, especially when the deceased had not been well liked in life. Many euphemisms are called into play: "vital," "energetic," and (repetitively) "full of life. ~ G.M. Malliet

Neither saints nor angels have ever increased my faith in this enigma Life; but what are called 'common men and women' have increased it. ~ Phyllis Bottome

[…] I began to see Algiers as one of the most fascinating and dramatic places on earth. In the small space of this beautiful but congested city intersected two great conflicts of the contemporary world. The first was the one between Christianity and Islam (expressed here in the clash between colonizing France and colonized Algeria). The second, which acquired a sharpness of focus immediately after the independence and departure of the French, was a conflict at the very heart of Islam, between its open, dialectical - I would even say "Mediterranean" - current and its other, inward-looking one, born of a sense of uncertainty and confusion vis-à-vis the contemporary world, guided by fundamentalists who take advantage of modern technology and organizational principles yet at the same time deem the defense of faith and custom against modernity as the condition of their own existence, their sole identity.

[…] In Algiers one speaks simply of the existence of two varieties of Islam - one, which is called the Islam of the desert, and a second, which is defined as the Islam of the river (or of the sea). The first is the religion practiced by warlike nomadic tribes struggling to survive in one of the world's most hostile environments, the Sahara. The second Islam is the faith of merchants, itinerant peddlers, people of the road and of the bazaar, for whom openness, compromise, and exchange are not only beneficial to trade, but necessary to life itself. ~ Ryszard Kapuscinski

I was never educated to be an actor. I went to a regular college. It was a great thing for me because I feel that the main thing to get out of college is a thirst for knowledge. College should teach you how to be curious. Most people think that college is the end of education, but it isn't. The ceremony of giving you the diploma is called commencement. And that means you are fit to commence learning because you have learned hot to learn. ~ Vincent Price

Poshlust," or in a better transliteration poshlost, has many nuances, and evidently I have not described them clearly enough in my little book on Gogol, if you think one can ask anybody if he is tempted by poshlost. Corny trash, vulgar clichés, Philistinism in all its phases, imitations of imitations, bogus profundities, crude, moronic, and dishonest pseudo-literature - these are obvious examples. Now, if we want to pin down poshlost in contemporary writing, we must look for it in Freudian symbolism, moth-eaten mythologies, social comment, humanistic messages, political allegories, overconcern with class or race, and the journalistic generalities we all know. Poshlost speaks in such concepts as "America is no better than Russia" or "We all share in Germany's guilt." The flowers of poshlost bloom in such phrases and terms as "the moment of truth," "charisma," "existential" (used seriously), "dialogue" (as applied to political talks between nations), and "vocabulary" (as applied to a dauber). Listing in one breath Auschwitz, Hiroshima, and Vietnam is seditious poshlost. Belonging to a very select club (which sports one Jewish name - that of the treasurer) is genteel poshlost. Hack reviews are frequently poshlost, but it also lurks in certain highbrow essays. Poshlost calls Mr. Blank a great poet and Mr. Bluff a great novelist. One of poshlost's favorite breeding places has always been the Art Exhibition; there it is produced by so-called sculptors working with the tools of wrec ~ Vladimir Nabokov

People who truly understand God's purpose for their lives know that we are called to be intimately involved with one another. ~ Zig Ziglar

A farmer who had a quarrelsome family called his sons and told them to lay a bunch of sticks before him. Then, after laying the sticks parallel to one another and binding them, he challenged his sons, one after one, to pick up the bundle and break it. They all tried, but in vain. Then, untying the bundle, he gave them the sticks to break one by one. This they did with the greatest ease. Then said the father, "Thus, my sons, as long as you remain united, you are a match for anything, but differ and separate, and you are undone". ~ Aesop

This is Harry.
As a boy, Harry was very, very shy.

Some people may have even said he was painfully shy. As if his shyness caused them pain and not the other way around.

There are many things that can cause a person to recede. To look away from other people's eyes or to choose empty hallways over crowded ones. Some shy people try to reach out and try, and nothing seems to come back and then there just comes a point where they stop trying.

In Harry's case he was slapped in the face and called names designed to isolate him, designed to deliver maximum damage. This because he came from a different country and didn't know the right words to use or the right way to say them.

And so, Harry learned how to be still, to camouflage, to be the least.

Some people describe this as receding into a shell, where the stillness hardens and protects. But the eyes, even when they look down and away, are still watching, still looking for some way out or in; painfully shy.

Then in middle school, Harry found theater, where he forced himself to speak through other people's words. And then dance, where he started to speak through the movements of his body. To be so still for so long when you're young, means a lot of pent up energy and it was released there through work, endless work.

If someone carves into a sapling with a knife, the injury is as wide as the entire trunk. Though that mark will never fully heal, you can g ~ Ze Frank

What tipped you off - about Stan, I mean?" I asked.
"Couple of things," Alex replied. "He referred to Blitzen as the dwarf and claimed you hadn't been in. Knowing how terrified you are of Sam - "
"I am not!"
" - I thought it was unlikely you'd skipped the shopping spree. So, I tested his story and called your phone. When I heard my ringtone, I knew he was lying about you being here. But the biggest clue? He refused to sell me anything. I mean, come on." He gestured to his pink cashmere sweater vest and tight lime-green pants. "A real clothing salesman would have seen dollar signs the minute I walked into the store. ~ Rick Riordan

Ask the angels to come be with you at night while you sleep. There is much that can be done to aid in the healing of your physical body. Please allow us to help you. Healing of the body requires love and light to be guided within the body to the blockages that obstruct the flow of energy. The love and light of God may be called forth by all who need it. However, it must be asked for, and it must be received. In order to receive this healing energy, the conscious mind must first allow it. That is why this type of healing is best accomplished while you are sleeping. The conscious mind is ~ Sinda Jordan

First of all, you have to keep unmasking the world about you for what it is: manipulative, controlling, power-hungry, and, in the long run, destructive. The world tells you many lies about who you are, and you simply have to be realistic enough to remind yourself of this. Every time you feel hurt, offended, or rejected, you have to dare to say to yourself: 'These feelings, strong as they may be, are not telling me the truth about myself. The truth, even though I cannot feel it right now, is that I am the chosen child of God, precious in God's eyes, called the Beloved from all eternity, and held safe in an everlasting belief. ~ Henri J.M. Nouwen

Women are more quiet. They don't feel called to mount a barrel and harangue by the hour every time they imagine they have produced an idea. ~ Anna Julia Cooper

A friend called the other day.
'How are you?' she said.
The sun was shining, the sky a merciless blue. It was only eleven in the morning but I had been awake since three twenty. I was in bed because, as usual, I could think of nowhere else to go. I said that I was feeling low. Low is the depressive's euphemism for despair.
She said: 'How can you be depressed on a day like this?'
I wanted to say: 'If I had flu, would you ask me how I could be sick on a day like this? ~ Sally Brampton

Souls, like rays of light, exist in perfect, parallel equality, always. But for when infinitely short a time they pass through the rough and delaying mechanism of life, they separate and disentangle, encountering different obstacles, traveling at different rates, like light refracted by the friction of things in its path. Emerging on the other side, they run together once more, in perfection. For the short and difficult span when confounded by matter and time they are made unequal, they try to bind together as they always were and eventually will be. The impulse to do so is called love. The extend to which they exceed is called justice. And the energy lost in the effort is called sacriface. On the infinite scale of things, this life is to a spark what a spark is to all the time man can imagine, but still, like a sudden rapids or bend in the river, it is that to which the eye of God may be drawn from time to time out of interest in happenstance. ~ Mark Helprin

The first kiss ideally signals rapture, exchange of hearts, and imminent marriage. Otherwise it is a kiss that lies. All very crude and nonsensical, and yet it is the staple myth of hundreds of comics called 'Sweethearts,' 'Romantic Secrets' and so forth. The state induced by the kiss is actually self-induced, of course, for few lips are so gifted with electric and psychedelic possibilities. ~ Germaine Greer

The most intriguing candidate for that "something else" is called the Broken Windows theory. Broken Windows was the brainchild of the criminologist James Q. Wilson and George Kelling. Wilson and Kelling argued that crime is the inevitable result of disorder. If a window is broken and left unrepaired, people walking by will conclude that no one cares and no one is in charge. Soon, more windows will be broken, and the sense of anarchy will spread from the building to the street on which it faces, sending a signal that anything goes. In a city, relatively minor problems like graffiti, public disorder, and aggressive panhandling, they write, are all the equivalent of broken windows, invitations to more serious crimes: ~ Malcolm Gladwell

So what will happen to your consciousness [after you die]? *Your* consciousness, yours, not anyone else's. Well, what are *you*? There's the point. Let's try to find out. What is it about you that you have always known as yourself? What are you conscious of in yourself? Your kidneys? Your liver? Your blood vessels? No. However far back you go in your memory, it is always in some external, active manifestation of yourself that you come across your identity
in the work of your hands, in your family, in other people. And now listen carefully. You in others
this is your soul. This is what you are. This is what your consciousness has breathed and lived on and enjoyed throughout your life
your soul, your immortality, your life in others. And what now? You have always been in others and you will remain in others. And what does it matter to you if later on that is called your memory? This will be you
the you that enters the future and becomes part of it. ~ Boris Pasternak

Really?" I whispered.
He crossed his arms on his chest and stated, "Babe, you think I found the woman of my
dreams at forty-five years old and I'm gonna let anything happen to her, think again. That's a long fuckin' time to wait for what you want. I waited. I
found it. I'm pullin' out all the stops to take care of it. I know you feel the same for me so I'm doin' the same to keep me safe for you. So yeah, really, I
called Delgado. I made peace and asked a favor. His woman is in your posse so she wouldn't be doin' cartwheels, he said no and something went
down with you or, for you, me. And he isn't dumb, he's a man who knows to collect favors and he's a man
whose business means he often has the need to call markers. So his ear's to the ground and his eyes are open so if a cop isn't cruisin' by your
house or bakery, one of Lee's boys or one of Hawk's commandos are. Smart people pay attention to who's cruisin' around people they want to fuck
with and smart people will see cops, Nightingale's men and Delgado's crazy motherfuckers and, my hope is, they'll steer clear. So, there you go.
Now you got a full explanation of what I mean when I say you're on radar."
I heard all he said, I really did.
But I was stuck at the beginning part where he told me I was the woman of his dreams. ~ Kristen Ashley

what Russell called a 'logical construction out of aggregates of facts. (This does not mean that all statements about the average are sensible or useful: as has been said, the average person has one testicle and one breast.) ~ Simon Blackburn

In so-called primitive societies there are two words for power, mana and taboo: the power which creates and the power which destroys; the power which is benign and the power which is malign. Odd that we have retained in our vocabulary the word for dangerous power, taboo, and have lost mana. ~ Madeleine L'Engle

We are all called to fulfill God's five purposed for our lives: to worship, to fellowship, to grow like Christ, to serve, and to be on mission with God in the world. ~ Rick Warren

A blanket could be used to represent a thing. Now this thing is curious, because it represents an idea. This idea is called sleep, and as far as ideathings go, it's about as relaxing as it gets. Ideas within sleep are called dreams, and they are like bricks, only not real and considerably lighter and less damaging as they bounce off your skull. So if a dream is an ideaideathing, then a dream about a blanket would be an ideathingideathing, and thinking about that makes me want to crack my brainbone with a brick. ~ Jarod Kintz

She went a little fucking overboard on her anger." He looks at me. "Her daughters are all a bit nuts, so you know exactly where they get it from."
"She called the fucking cops on me," I retort. "That's not nuts that's
"
"It's nuts," he rebuts.
"It's fucked up."
"That too," he says. ~ Krista Ritchie

There is no power from God that is separated from love. If you want to have influence, you have to join yourself to his love nature. This is more than a feeling or an emotion. It is an attitude of acceptance toward everyone and everything that is God's, even if you can't control it, manage it, or even nurture it. You are called to love. ~ Shawn Bolz

He called her on the road
From a lonely cold hotel room
Just to hear her say I love you one more time
But when he heard the sound
Of the kids laughing in the background
He had to wipe away a tear from his eye
A little voice came on the phone
Said "Daddy when you coming home"
He said the first thing that came to his mind

I'm already there
Take a look around
I'm the sunshine in your hair
I'm the shadow on the ground
I'm the whisper in the wind
I'm your imaginary friend
And I know I'm in your prayers
Oh I'm already there

She got back on the phone
Said I really miss you darling
Don't worry about the kids they'll be alright
Wish I was in your arms
Lying right there beside you
But I know that I'll be in your dreams tonight
And I'll gently kiss your lips
Touch you with my fingertips
So turn out the light and close your eyes

I'm already there
Don't make a sound
I'm the beat in your heart
I'm the moonlight shining down
I'm the whisper in the wind
And I'll be there until the end
Can you feel the love that we share
Oh I'm already there

We may be a thousand miles apart
But I'll be with you wherever you are

I'm already there
Take a look around
I'm the sunshine in your hair
I'm the shadow on the ground
I'm the whisper in the wind
And I'll be there until the ~ Lonestar

My financial adviser Ric Edelman ... thinks the time to start educating people about money is when they are children. He's set up a retirement plan called the RIC-E-Trust that can provide retirement security. A $5,000 one-time tax-deferred investment at birth, with an average interest rate of ten percent compounded, means that a child would have $2.4 million when he or she is 65 years old. Who needs Social Security with that kind of nest egg? ~ Cal Thomas

The Assyrian. That is, the persecutors of the church: who are here called Assyrians by the prophet: because the Assyrians were at that time the chief enemies and persecutors of the people of God. - Ibid. Seven shepherds, &c. Viz., the pastors of God's church, and the defenders of the faith. The number seven in scripture is taken to signify many: and when eight is joined with it, we are to under stand ~ Anonymous

Other victims of neurotic dependency are battered wives. The fact that they are so often financially dependent upon the men who beat them makes for a vicious kind of entrapment. It's emotional dependency, though that puts a double lock on the trap. "There's a kind of panic that many women have about being able to make it in any way other than being dependent on their husbands (...) They've been taught their whole lives that they can't. It's a conditioning process."
In situations in which they have no effect on their environments, animals begin to give up. (...) the same thing happens to humans. Stay long enough in a situation in which you feel you have no control, and you will simply stop responding. It's called learned helplessness. (...) Having been "shaped" to believe there is nothing she can do about the situation, the battered wife goes on being battered.Only after she begins to disengage from her belief in her own helplessness can she break out of the vicious cycle of dependency and its brutal effect on her life. ~ Colette Dowling