So Called Romance Quotes

Just as abruptly, he'd become a father. While preparing the book for publication, he'd been dating a woman named Sarah Coowe, an infectious-disease specialist at MGH. They were evenly matched in many ways: sharp-dressed, sharp-tongued, and devoted to their careers and personal freedoms to the exclusion of any serious interest in so-called romance. They spent ten months together. A few weeks after they broke up -- Sarah initiated the split -- she called to say that she was pregnant. "It's mine?" asked Affenlight. "He or she," replied Sarah, "is mostly mine."

They named the child Pella -- that was Affenlight's idea, though Sarah certainly had the final say. For those first couple of years, Affenlight conspired as often as he could to show up at Sarah and Pella's Kendall Square townhouse with expensive takeout and a new toy. He was fascinated with his daughter, with the sheer reality of her, a beautiful something where before there'd been nothing. He hated kissing her good-bye; and yet he relished, couldn't keep himself from relishing, the total quiet of his townhouse when he walked in, the scattered books and papers and lack of baby-proofing. ~ Chad Harbach

The only patriots worth their salt are the ones who love their country enough to see that in a nuclear age it is not going to survive unless the world survives. True patriots are no longer champions of Democracy, Communism, or anythig like that but champions of the Human Race. It is not the Homeland that they feel called on to defend at any cost but the planet Earth as Home. If in the interests of making sure we don't blow ourselves off the map once and for all, we end up relinquishing a measure of national sovereignty to some international body, so much the worse for national sovereignty. There is only one Sovereignty that matters ultimately, and it is another sort altogether. ~ Frederick Buechner

What counts as religious or secular in any given context is a function of different configurations of power. The question then becomes why such essentialist constructions are so common. I argue that, in what are called "Western" societies, the attempt to create a transhistorical and transcultural concept of religion that is essentially prone to violence is one of the foundational legitimating myths of the liberal nation-state. The myth of religious violence helps to construct and marginalise a religious other, prone to fanaticism, to contrast with the rational, peace-keeping, secular subject. This myth can and is used in domestic politics to legitimate the marginalisation of certain types of practices and groups labeled religious, while underwriting the nation-state's monopoly on its citizens' willingness to sacrifice and kill. In foreign policy, the myth of religious violence serves to cast nonsecular social orders, especially Muslim societies, in the role of the villain. THEY have not yet learned to remove the dangerous influence of religion from political life. THEIR violence is therefore irrational and fanatical. OUR violence, being secular, is rational, peace making, and sometimes regrettably necessary to contain their violence. We find ourselves obliged to bomb them into liberal democracy. ~ William T. Cavanaugh

I kind of hate Nick right now, too, but there's someone else higher on my list, someone I hate more than Saddam Hussein and any asshole named Bush combined, hate more than that fuckhead who canceled 'My So-Called Life' and left me with a too-small boxed DVD set that does not answer the questions whether Angela and Jordan Catalano did it, or if Patty and Graham got a divorce, or if there really was something to all that lesbian subtext between Rayanne and Sharon. ~ Rachel Cohn

Evan Connell said once that he knew he was finished with a short story when he found himself going through it and taking out commas and then going through the story again and putting the commas back in the same places. I like that way of working on something. I respect that kind of care for what is being done. That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones, with the punctuation in the right places so that they an best say what they are meant to say. If the words are heavy with the writer's own unbridled emotions, or if they are imprecise and inaccurate for some other reason
if the worlds are in any way blurred
the reader's eyes will slide right over them and nothing will be achieved. Henry James called this sort of hapless writing 'weak specification'. ~ Raymond Carver

I didn't make a nuisance of myself, not until the end, anyway, and I never outstayed my welcome, not while there was still a welcome to be outstayed; but I was kind and sincere and thoughtful and devoted and I remembered things about her and I told her she was beautiful and bought her little presents that usually referred to a conversation we had had recently. None of this was an effort, of course, and none of it was done with any sense of calculation: I found it easy to remember things about her, because I didn't think about anything else, and I really did think she was beautiful, and I would not have been able to prevent myself from buying her little presents, and I did not have to feign devotion. There was no effort involved. So when one of Charlie's friends, a girl called Kate, said wistfully one lunchtime that she wished she could find somebody like me, I was surprised and thrilled. Thrilled because Charlie was listening, and it didn't do me any harm, but surprised because all I had done was act out of self-interest.
And yet this was enough, it seemed, to turn me into someone desirable. Weird ~ Nick Hornby

I am called to live in perfect relation to God so that my life produces a longing after God in other lives, not admiration for myself. Thoughts about myself hinder my usefulness to God. God is not after perfecting me to be a specimen in His show-room; He is getting me to the place where He can use me. Let Him do what He likes. ~ Oswald Chambers

When I went to the scientific doctor
I realised what a lust there was in him to wreak his so-called science on me
and reduce me to the level of a thing.
So I said: Good-morning! and left him. ~ D.H. Lawrence

So okay. C-section in the morning? Why not?
Chris still hadn't shown up when I felt the examining room. Nor had he answered my call asking him what was up.
I got in my car to drive to the hospital, then did what a lot of women do in that situation: I called my mom.
"Hey, honey, are you okay?" she asked.
"Yes." I burst into tears. Until that moment, I hadn't realized how close to panicking I really was.
"What's wrong?" she asked.
"I…don't know where Chris is. I have to go to the hospital to have the baby-"
"It'll be OK," she said quickly. "I'm going to the airport. I'll be there."
I didn't even get to explain the full situation.
Then Chris called. "Where are you?" I asked. I was somewhere between relieved and angry-or maybe I was both angry and relieved.
"I just had some stuff happen," he said. "I'm okay. I'll tell you when I see you."
"I need you now," I said, telling him about the baby.
If you've read American Sniper, you know what had happened to him: he passed out during what should have been a very routine procedure to remove a cyst in his neck. It was a freak thing that led to what we think was a temporary seizure.
Some "thing." But being a SEAL and being Chris, he completely minimized it. In fact, I didn't know what had happened until later. All I knew was that he met me at the hospital and was by my side when I needed him.
There is a bit of a funny story attached to the incident. A friend of Chris's ~ Taya Kyle

I never fell in love with her so I guess the part of the brain that controls love doesn't respond to being called a dick.'
'For your sake, I'm hoping no part of your brain responds to being called a dick.'
'Fair point. ~ Cath Crowley

Korie: I met Willie for the first time when we were in the third grade at Camp Ch-Yo-Ca, the camp I grew up at. Willie and Jase went to my session of the camp, and Alan came for high school week. Kay was cooking in the kitchen that summer, so her boys could attend the camp for free. I remember thinking Willie was the cutest thing I had ever seen and was so funny. We called him by his middle name, Jess, at the time. He had these big dimples and the cutest sideways smile. I had a diary that I never really wrote in, but that summer, I wrote: "I met a boy at summer camp and he was so cute. He asked me on the moonlight hike and I said 'yes'!" I even wrote "Korie Loves Jess" on the bunk of the cabin I was staying in that summer.
Yes, Willie asked me to go on the moonlight hike with him. It was always a big deal every summer figuring out which boy was going to ask you to accompany him on the moonlight hike, and I was thrilled when he asked me! Willie was definitely my first crush. ~ Willie Robertson

From a philosophical point of view, Leibniz's most interesting argument was that absolute space conflicted with what he called the principle of the identity of indiscernibles (PII). PII says that if two objects are indiscernible, then they are identical, i.e. they are really one and the same object. What does it mean to call two objects indiscernible? It means that no difference at all can be found between them--they have exactly the same attributes. So if PII is true, then any two genuinely distinct objects must differ in at least one of their attributes--otherwise they would be one, not two. PII is intuitively quite compelling. It certainly is not easy to find an example of two distinct objects that share all their attributes. Even two mass-produced factory goods will normally differ in innumerable ways, even if the differences cannot be detected with the naked eye.

Leibniz asks us to imagine two different universes, both containing exactly the same objects. In Universe One, each object occupies a particular location in absolute space.In Universe Two, each object has been shifted to a different location in absolute space, two miles to the east (for example). There would be no way of telling these two universes apart. For we cannot observe the position of an object in absolute space, as Newton himself admitted. All we can observe are the positions of objects relative to each other, and these would remain unchanged--for all objects are shifted by the same amount. N ~ Samir Okasha

Human beings are hard-wired to make relationships. We do so in many capacities, fleeting and long-lasting, between different sexes, both inside and outside of the confines of the almost universally accepted partnership we called marriage. ~ Louisa Leontiades

The brain-disease model overlooks four fundamental truths: (1) our capacity to destroy one another is matched by our capacity to heal one another. Restoring relationships and community is central to restoring well-being; (2) language gives us the power to change ourselves and others by communicating our experiences, helping us to define what we know, and finding a common sense of meaning; (3) we have the ability to regulate our own physiology, including some of the so-called involuntary functions of the body and brain, through such basic activities as breathing, moving, and touching; and (4) we can change social conditions to create environments in which children and adults can feel safe and where they can thrive. ~ Bessel A. Van Der Kolk

Nihilism is but the other side of conventionalism; its creed consists of negations of the current so-called positive values, to which it remains bound. ~ Hannah Arendt

At the end of Season 1 of 'Cheers', it was the lowest rated show in all of network television ... So we turn to 'Bill Cosby'; when he came to Thursday night, he just exploded. And once the audience was there, we said, 'Hey, by the way, we also have this other great show. It's called 'Cheers'.' ~ Warren Littlefield

A man approaching retirement called the retirement office to inquire about his pension. Afterward, he was asked if his wife worked. "She's worked all her life making me happy", he replied. "Yes sir, but has she earned money to receive her pension?" "When we got married we agreed on an arrangement", he said. "I would earn the living, and she would make the living worthwhile".
"Make the living worthwhile" ... have we forgotten the very essence of that? Have we forgotten to live for someone else, that doing so IS what makes a living worthwhile? ~ Kelly Crawford

We have to set our own agenda, we have to set our own standards, we have to be very strong about what we want, we have to be very strong about our passion and if it's not right for you, you shouldn't do it just because you're advised by so-called geniuses. ~ Jackie DeShannon

The process of becoming great comprises of life's toughest difficulties, that 99% people quit in the beginning itself, but the one who survives mark his/her name in the pages of History and called as the greatest human.

Moral: When you face the toughest difficulties in life, do not frustrate, be calm and happy thinking you're chosen by the ALMIGHTY. But before rewarding you something worthwhile, the ALMIGHTY will test you so badly just to make sure whether you can handle extreme of the extreme pressure or not. The positive test result proves that you're capable of handling SUCCESS and a true owner of the blissful life. Be confident and never ever quit, keep walking the way of your dreams. It just needs one bloody day to change it all. ~ Harshal Gondane

In the field of marketing ... the trend toward selling [has] reached something of a nadir with the unveiling ... of so-called subliminal projection. That is the technique designed to flash messages past our conscious guard. ~ Vance Packard

The kids helped keep me together as well. One day they came in from playing after dinner, and I told them I was just completely exhausted by work and everything else. I said I'd take a shower as soon as I finished up; then we'd read and get ready for bed.
They warmed up some towels in the dryer while I was showering and had them waiting for me when I was done. They made some hot coffee--not really understanding that coffee before bed isn't the best strategy. But it was just the way I like it, and waiting on the bed stand. They turned down the bedcovers and even fluffed my pillows.
Most of the time, their gifts are unintentional.
Angel recently decided that, since the Tooth Fairy is so nice, someone should be nice to her. My daughter wrote a little note and left it under her pillow with some coins and her tooth.
Right?
The Tooth Fairy was very taken with that, and wrote a note back.
"I'm not allowed to take money from the children I visit," she wrote. "But I was so grateful. Thank you."
Then there was the time the kids were rummaging through one of Chris's closets and discovered the Christmas Elf.
Now everyone knows that the Christmas Elf only appears on Christmas Eve. He stays for a short while as part of holiday cheer, then magically disappears for the rest of the year.
"What was he doing here!" they said, very concerned, as they brought the little elf to me. "And in Daddy's closet!"
I called on the special brain cells paren ~ Taya Kyle

Tris: Wait. So you have no idea what my aptitude is?
Tori: Yes and No. My conclusion is that you display equal aptitude for Abnegation, Dauntless and Erudite. People who get this kind of result are..are called ... Divergent. ~ Veronica Roth

Everything you do is autobiographical. Yeah, I grew up in a town called Redding and I had older brothers and sisters so it's all my memories of growing up. ~ Ricky Gervais

There was a black marine called Philly Dog who'd been a gang lord in Philadelphia and who was looking forward to some street fighting after six months in the jungle, he could so the kickers what he could do with some city ground. (In Hue he turned out to be incredibly valuable. I saw him pouring out about a hundred rounds of .30-caliber fire into a breach in the wall, laughing, 'You got to bring some to get some'; he seemed to be about the only man in Delta Company who hadn't been hurt yet.) ~ Michael Herr

He broke up with me last week because he'd decided there was something fundamentally incompatible about us deep down and that we'd only get hurt more if we played it out. He called it preemptive dumping. So maybe you have this premonition that there is something fundamentally incompatible and you're preempting the preemption. ~ John Green

We judge nothing so hastily as character, and yet there is nothing over which we should be more cautious ... I have always found that the so-called bad people improve on closer acquaintance, while the good fall off. ~ Georg C. Lichtenberg

Well, my epic freedom moment was short-lived, because I realized my cell phone was dead. I walked down the road to a gas station and asked if I could use the phone. I called Tracy and told her where I was and asked her to pick me up. When Tracy arrived I hopped in the car and the very first thing I said to her was "I gotta get home. I have to print out some TV guides and I need to write a letter to some of the guys in there." She started laughing and when she could compose herself enough to talk said, "My sisters and I all said we guarantee Noah is going to come out of jail with new friends. He's going to be friends with everybody."
I got home and immediately wrote a letter to Michael Bolton. I put my email address at the bottom. I printed out TV guides. I printed out crossword puzzles. I even printed a couple of pages of jokes and riddles and whatever would be fun to read and do and folded them up and put them in an envelope. All that was left to do was to write the address, put a stamp on the envelope, and put it in the mailbox. I put the envelope in the car in between the seat and the center console to take to the post office.
I must have been distracted or had to do something else because the envelope sat there for months. Every so often I would look at it and go, Oh crap, I haven't sent that yet. And then at some point I spilled something on it so I knew I would never send it now. I threw it out.
To this day I'm worried that one day I'm going to be at the ~ Noah Galloway

In the Muslim world according to bin Laden, the Ottomans hardly count. Islamic fundamentalists look back almost exclusively to the Arab caliphate, particularly its early years. Those who see history as bin Laden did are generally called Salafi Muslims. Those who want to act like bin Laden to change the system through violence are called Salafi jihadis. Al-Qaeda is a Salafi jihadi movement. Salafism is Islam as Allah recited it, and jihadi means "through war," so it is a militant movement seeking an "originalist" form of Islam and willing to use force to get there. Salafism is often associated with the Wahhabi movement, an equally austere branch of Sunni Islam that arose in the early part of the eighteenth century. Wahhabis dominate Saudi Arabia, the paymaster and invisible hand behind many political machinations in the Middle East. In ~ Richard Engel

This is a very painful and delicate subject, I know, but I dare not turn away from it. It has long been my sorrowful conviction that the standard of daily life among professing Christians in this country has been gradually falling. I am afraid that Christ-like charity, kindness, good temper, unselfishness, meekness, gentleness, good nature, self denial, zeal to do good and separation from the world are far less appreciated than they ought to be and than they used to be in the days of our fathers.

Into the causes of this state of things I cannot pretend to enter fully and can only suggest conjectures for consideration. It may be that a certain profession of religion has become so fashionable and comparatively easy in the present age that the streams which were once narrow and deep have become wide and shallow, and what we have gained in outward show we have lost in quality. It may be that our contemporary affluence and comfortable lifestyles have insensibly introduced a plague of worldliness and self indulgence and a love of ease. What were once called luxuries are now comforts and necessities, and self denial and "enduring hardness" are consequently little known. It may be that the enormous amount of controversy which marks this age has insensibly dried up our spiritual life. We have too often been content with zeal for orthodoxy and have neglected the sober realities of daily practical godliness. Be the causes what they may, I must declare my own belief that the r ~ J.C. Ryle

'Boyz-n-the-Hood' was actually supposed to be written for Eazy's group. He had a group out in New York called Home Boys Only, called HBO. One of them looked like LL Cool J. Eazy wanted to write a song for them, a street song, like what we were doing on the mix tapes. So when I wrote it, it was too West Coast for them. ~ Ice Cube

I am not anti-American,' he said. 'I just despise the current American administration. I despair that Bush has made ordinary, decent people all over the world think twice about what was once, and still could be again, a great country, when what happened on September 11th should have made ordinary, decent people all over the world embrace America as never before. I don't like it that neo-conservative politicians bully their so-called allies while playing to the worst, racist instincts of their own bewildered electorate. I don't like it that we live in an era where to be anti-war is to be anti-American, to be pro-Palestine is to be anti-Semitic, to be critical of Blair is somehow to be supportive of Putin and Chirac. All anybody is asking for in this so-called age of terror is some leadership. Yet everywhere you look in public life there is no truth, no courage, no dignity to speak of. ~ Charles Cumming

I remember I grew up in Pasadena in a very, kind of, homogeneous, kind of, suburban existence and then I went to college at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. And there were all these, kind of, hipster New York kids who were so-called 'cultured' and had so much, you know, like knew all the references and, like, already had their look down. ~ Mike White

Jesus Christ is called "the image of the invisible God" (Colossians 1:15). The Greek word used for image in the passage is eikon, from which we get the word icon. Jesus Christ is the only exact icon or physical representation of the invisible and unrepresentable deity. "For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form" (Colossians 2:9). This is what paganism attempts with its idols - having a point of contact with God. By being close to the idol, the worshiper hopes to be close to God, for to his mind the idol possesses some degree of deity in itself. But just as God ridiculed the pagan idols as being blind, deaf, and dumb, so surely did Jesus Christ not only possess sight, hearing, and speech but give sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, and speech to the dumb. He was God in the flesh, walking among us, talking to us, eating with us, weeping with us. ~ Michael S. Horton

Minors should not be exposed to what is going on in the so-called news. ~ Sinead O'Connor

The phone rang and Archie announced, "The Russians would like to see a typical Canadian home, so I am bringing them home in about an hour. Just have some tea and cookies ready for a snack.---At that time in history, the Russians had nuclear weapons pointing at the U.S. and the U.S. had nuclear weapons pointing at them. No one knew what would happen. They called it the "Cold War." but it was a very dangerous time to be having Russians dropping into our home. ~ Helen Goldie

Because of the economies of scale in data, the cloud giants are increasingly powerful. And because they're so susceptible to regulation, these companies have a vested interest in keeping government entities happy. When the Justice Department requested billions of search records from AOL, Yahoo, and MSN in 2006, the three companies quickly complied. (Google, to its credit, opted to fight the request.) Stephen Arnold, an IT expert who worked at consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, says that Google at one point housed three officers of "an unnamed intelligence agency" at its headquarters in Mountain View. And Google and the CIA have invested together in a firm called Recorded Future, which focuses on using data connections to predict future real-world events. ~ Eli Pariser

She observed the dumb-show by which her neighbour was expressing her passion for music, but she refrained from copying it. This was not to say that, for once that she had consented to spend a few minutes in Mme. de Saint-Euverte's house, the Princesse des Laumes would not have wished (so that the act of politeness to her hostess which she had performed by coming might, so to speak, 'count double') to shew herself as friendly and obliging as possible. But she had a natural horror of what she called 'exaggerating,' and always made a point of letting people see that she 'simply must not' indulge in any display of emotion that was not in keeping with the tone of the circle in which she moved, although such displays never failed to make an impression upon her, by virtue of that spirit of imitation, akin to timidity, which is developed in the most self-confident persons, by contact with an unfamiliar environment, even though it be inferior to their own. She began to ask herself whether these gesticulations might not, perhaps, be a necessary concomitant of the piece of music that was being played, a piece which, it might be, was in a different category from all the music that she had ever heard before; and whether to abstain from them was not a sign of her own inability to understand the music, and of discourtesy towards the lady of the house; with the result that, in order to express by a compromise both of her contradictory inclinations in turn, at one moment she would merely stra ~ Marcel Proust

You call me disrespectful
When it's not possible in my being
To disrespect
A pebble in the street.
A bug on the wall.
A leaf on a tree.
Or any of God's creatures.
Even those that are pests or perhaps unsafe.
How can you say that I am so...
With the man I love?
All you need to do is to
Turn back the words you say to me
And say them to yourself
To know the truth.
You're just looking in the mirror
And seeing yourself when you look at me.
It's called projection...
One letter away from protection.
And this understanding
Is the only thing
That brings me comfort. ~ Kate McGahan

The kind of people I know now don't have barbecues, Mama. They stand up alone at nights in small rooms and eat cold weenies. My so-called friends are bums. Many of them are nothing but rats. They spread T.B. and use dirty language. They're wife-beaters and window peepers and night crawlers and dope fiends. They have running sores on the backs of their hands that never heal. They peer up from cracks in the floor with their small red eyes and wait for chances. ~ Charles Portis

The truth is you've already heard this. That this is what it's like. That it's what makes room for the universes inside you, all the endless inbent fractals of connection and symphonies of different voices, the infinities you can never show another soul. And you think it makes you a fraud, the tiny fraction anyone else ever sees? Of course you're a fraud, of course what people see is never you. And of course you know this, and of course you try to manage what part they see if you know it's only a part. Who wouldn't? It's called free will, Sherlock. But at the same time it's why it feels so good to break down and cry in front of others, or to laugh, or speak in tongues, or chant in Bengali--it's not English anymore, it's not getting squeezed through any hole. ~ David Foster Wallace