Stepping Out Of The Bubble Quotes

Inevitably, if we are to grow and change as adults, we must gradually learn to confront the challenges, paradoxes, problems and painful reality of an insecure world. ~ James P. Krehbiel

In Zen there is a sense of blending, of stepping out of your body and mind and gaining access to powers and abilities that are far beyond the minds of mortal men. ~ Frederick Lenz

Well," I ventured as we left Salazar's office, stepping back into the long hallway. I glanced over at Kanin, Zeke and Jackal, and shrugged. "What now?"
Jackal rolled his eyes and stepped away from us. "What now is that I am going to relax for a few hours without listening to the lot of you whine at me. 'Ohhh, don't hurt the humans, ohhh, we have to save refugees from mole men, ohhh, Kanin's dying.' Ugh." He made a disgusted gesture with both hands. "It's enough to make me puke. I am going to the bar to get this taste out of my mouth. You all can do whatever you want. ~ Julie Kagawa

You find
yourself in another
world you weren't
looking for where
what you see is that
you have always been
the wolves
at the door. Left

ajar, gaping, your own
door. ~ Forrest Gander

I was headed out down a long bone-white road, straight as a string and smooth as glass and glittering and wavering in the heat and humming under the tires like a plucked nerve. I was doing seventy-five but I never seemed to catch up with the pool which seemed to be over the road just this side of the horizon. Then, after a while, the sun was in my eyes, for I was driving west. So I pulled the sun screen down and squinted and put the throttle to the floor. And kept on moving west. For West is where we all plan to go some day. It is where you go when the land gives out and the old-field pines encroach. It is where you go when you get the letter saying: Flee, all is discovered. It is where you go when you look down at the blade in your hand and the blood on it. It is where you go when you are told that you are a bubble on the tide of empire. It is where you go when you hear that thar's gold in them-thar hills. It is where you go to grow up with the country. It is where you go to spend your old age. Or it is just where you go.
It was just where I went. ~ Robert Penn Warren

So, Joanie came over with some ice bubble hash
not sure what that means, but it's good
and I freaked her out with some Pink Floyd. She didn't know the early stuff so much.
We went out into the garden with a fairly big-screen laptop, it was warmish, and after we were high and drinking a few beers, I played for her these videos, in this order:
Jugband Blues
Astronomy Domine (2x, once with Syd, once with Dave)
Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun
One of These Days
A Saucerful of Secrets
Echoes
Comfortably Numb
She passed out on the settee and I threw a cover over her. lol ~ Sienna McQuillen

stepping out of the airport into coastal Colombia is like getting bludgeoned with a sack of wet laundry. ~ Brian Kevin

The imagination is unleashed by constraints. You break out of the box by stepping into shackles. ~ Jonah Lehrer

Yeah, I'm just trying to figure out what it means. I've never heard of bonds sharing languages either, and yet ... '
I pull her even closer, feeling an explosion of heat rush between us as I whisper, 'I think it means we were meant to be together.
'If you two start making out I will fling you out of the wind bubble,' Gus warns.
I can't help laughing. ~ Shannon Messenger

You break out of the box by stepping into shackles.
From Imagine: How Creativity Works pg 23 (hardcover) ~ Jonah Lehrer

Wenna followed us out. "You've done him some good, Clary, I have to say! He's got color in his cheeks, and he's stepping along as if he was sixty again," she told Goodwin as she walked us to the gate. "You'll come back?"
"Of course," Goodwin said. "But thank Cooper for his improved spirits. Once he'd insulted her a few times, he was in the pink. ~ Tamora Pierce

He saw that at its center were Coretta and Yoki, unharmed. And then, having made sure of that, Martin Luther King became very calm, with what Branch calls "the remote calm of a commander." Stepping back out on the porch, he held up his hand for silence. Everything was all right, he told the crowd. "Don't get panicky. Don't do anything panicky. Don't get your weapons. If you have weapons, take them home. He who lives by the sword will perish by the sword. Remember that is what Jesus said. We are not advocating violence. We want to love our enemies. I want you to love our enemies. Be good to them. This is what we must live by. We must meet hate with love." The crowd was silent now, as King continued speaking. He himself might die, he said, but that wouldn't matter. "If I am stopped, this movement will not stop. If I am stopped, our work will not stop. For what we are doing is right. What we are doing is just. ~ Robert A. Caro

...The efficacy of psychedelics with regard to art has to do with their ability to render language weightless, as fluid and ephemeral as those famous "bubble letters" of the sixties. Psychedelics, I think, disconnect both the signifier and the signified from their purported referents in the phenomenal world - simultaneously bestowing upon us a visceral insight into the cultural mechanics of language, and a terrifying inference of the tumultuous nature that swirls beyond it. In my own experience, it always seemed as if language were a tablecloth positioned neatly upon the table until some celestial busboy suddenly shook it out, fluttering and floating it, and letting it fall back upon the world in not quite the same position as before - thereby giving me a vertiginous glimpse into the abyss that divides the world from our knowing of it. And it is into this abyss that the horror vacui of psychedelic art deploys itself like an incandescent bridge. Because it is one thing to believe, on theoretical evidence, that we live in a prison-house of language. It is quite another to know it, to actually peek into the slippery emptiness as the Bastille explodes around you. Yet psychedelic art takes this apparent occasion for despair and celebrates our escape from linguistic control by flowing out, filling that rippling void with meaningful light, laughter, and a gorgeous profusion. ~ Dave Hickey

Check it out."
Jonah removed the bubble wrap and held up the picture for his three cousins.
Dan took a step backward. The shock was almost as powerful as it had been the day before at the Uffizi. "It's perfect! It's every bit as disgusting as the real one!"
Amy nodded. "And so fast. We only called you yesterday."
Jonah shrugged. "Even the Janus take a short cut every now and then. You can do a lot with digitization these days. You break the picture down to squares and reproduce them one at a time. The other two are just as fly."
"You mean, hog ugly," Hamilton amended.
"The serpents don't help," Dan put in critically. "Live fat spaghetti. Lady, if you're thinking of a modeling career, forget it!"
The rapper clucked sympathetically. "You guys just don't appreciate the power of the visual image. The Wiz used to be like that–until Gangsta Kronikles. When you're in film industry, you understand the whole picture's-worth-a-thousand-words deal."
Hamilton rolled his eyes. "Here we go again. ~ Gordon Korman

We had been playing our assigned roles on the office stage, but stepping down from the stage, abandoning the images that we had been projecting there, we were both just unstable, awkward lumps of flesh, warm pieces of meat kitted out with digestive tracts and hearts and brains and reproductive organs. ~ Haruki Murakami

From deep water came the crocodile. Out of black water, carved with whirlpools, and into the frill of gold shallows by the stepping-stones. ~ Norah Burke

I have never met a truly strong person who didn't have self-respect. I think a lot of inwardly and outwardly directed contempt passes itself off as self-respect: the idea of raising yourself by stepping on someone's shoulders instead of doing it yourself. When I see guys working out for cosmetic reasons, I see vanity exposing them in the worst way, as cartoon characters, billboards for imbalance and insecurity. Strength reveals itself through character. - The Iron ~ Henry Rollins

There are all kinds of pedants around with more time to read and imitate Lynne Truss and John Humphrys than to write poems, love-letters, novels and stories it seems. They whip out their Sharpies and take away and add apostrophes from public signs, shake their heads at prepositions which end sentences and mutter at split infinitives and misspellings, but do they bubble and froth and slobber and cream with joy at language? Do they ever let the tripping of the tips of their tongues against the tops of their teeth transport them to giddy euphoric bliss? Do they ever yoke impossible words together for the sound-sex of it? Do they use language to seduce, charm, excite, please, affirm and tickle those they talk to? Do they? I doubt it. They're too farting busy sneering at a greengrocer's less than perfect use of the apostrophe. Well sod them to Hades. They think they're guardians of language. They're no more guardians of language than the Kennel Club is the guardian of dogkind. ~ Stephen Fry

Leaders instill courage in the hearts of those who follow. This rarely happens through words alone. It generally requires action. It goes back to what we said earlier: Somebody has to go first. By going first, the leader furnishes confidence to those who follow.

As a next generation leader, you will be called upon to go first. That will require courage. But in stepping out you will give the gift of courage to those who are watching.

What do I believe is impossible to do in my field, but if it could be done would fundamentally change my business?

What has been done is safe. But to attempt a solution to a problem that plagues an entire industry - in my case, the local church - requires courage.

Unsolved problems are gateways to the future. To those who have the courage to ask the question and the tenacity to hang on until they discover or create an answer belongs the future.

Don't allow the many good opportunities to divert your attention from the one opportunity that has the greatest potential. Learn to say no. There will always be more opportunities than there is time to pursue them.

Leaders worth following are willing to face and embrace current reality regardless of how discouraging or embarrassing it might be.

It is impossible to generate sustained growth or progress if your plan for the future is not rooted in reality.

Be willing to face the truth regardless of how painful it might be. ~ Andy Stanley

Forget conventionalisms; forget what the world thinks of you stepping out of your place; think your best thoughts, speak your best words, work your best works, looking to your own conscience for approval. ~ Susan B. Anthony

Mascara is my go-to product before stepping out of the house. ~ Lindsey Vonn

There was an image in my mind - an expectation of what it would be like when I finally gave myself fully to a man. It wasn't like this. It was always at night with candles flickering lazily, music filling the air with a sexy melody, and maybe a bubble bath. But no. It was infinitely better, and there was no froo froo, stereotypical scene that played out.
It was incredible.
Brilliant.
Amazing.
Indescribable, really. Like all the planets in the galaxy aligned for a perfect moment in time. As if this was the beginning of time. From now until the rest of eternity, everything finally had meaning. ~ Laura Kreitzer

Failure is not the opposite to success, it's a stepping stone to success. If our primary goal is to be approved of, then we are not going to take risks, we are not going to speak out, we are going to try to blend in. ~ Arianna Huffington

I was part of your train but my railroad car was disconnected and
switched at the track, and now my friends and I are on a separate journey
learning how not to rock the lifeboat, sending out a patient S.O.S to you for
help. I reach out with love, possibly one of a dying breed, the old survival of the fittest theory, or perhaps I am throwing you a lifeline from my Rectangular Bubble. ~ Ann Lloyd

I don't even like the word 'indoors'. It doesn't make sense. According to you right now, by stepping through the doorway I'd be indoors. Yet I wouldn't actually be standing in the doorway. If it's supposed to refer to being inside a building, then they shouldn't have used the word 'door,' since last time I checked, doors don't make up every square inch of a building! And I'd assume that now, since I'm not indoors, you'd say I'm 'out of doors', right? But, shouldn't out of doors just be everywhere that's not directly under a door? You know what, from now on I insist that everyone refer to being in a building as being 'under-roof'. ~ Natalie Bina

Satisfaction is an excuse that arises out of comparison with success! Infact, it is the stepping stone of retirement. ~ Vishwanath S J

I did not mean to be a Christian. I have been very clear about that. My first words upon encountering the presence of Jesus for the first time 12 years ago, were, I swear to God, "I would rather die." I really would have rather died at that point than to have my wonderful brilliant left-wing non-believer friends know that I had begun to love Jesus. I think they would have been less appalled if I had developed a close personal friendship with Strom Thurmond. At least there is some reason to believe that Strom Thurmond is a real person. You know, more or less.

But I never felt like I had much choice with Jesus; he was relentless. I didn't experience him so much as the hound of heaven, as the old description has it, as the alley cat of heaven, who seemed to believe that if it just keeps showing up , mewling outside your door, you'd eventually open up and give him a bowl of milk. Of course, as soon as you do, you are fucked, and the next thing you know, he's sleeping on your bed every night, and stepping on your chest at dawn to play a little push-push.

I resisted as long as I could, like Sam-I-Am in "Green Eggs and Ham" - I would not, could not in a boat! I could not would not with a goat! I do not want to follow Jesus, I just want expensive cheeses. Or something. Anyway, he wore me out. He won.

I was tired and vulnerable and he won. I let him in. This is what I said at the moment of my conversion: I said, "Fuck it. Come in. I quit." He started ~ Anne Lamott

I have imagined him in my mind for so long, my imagination creating a monster of grotesque features and proportions. But standing before me, his head tilted and eyes sharp, is just a man. Slightly balding, twenty pounds too heavy, whose mouth is turning into a sneer. Whose eyes are narrowing, stance strong, the combined effect sinister. This man, this balding thick man, has whispered in my ear, poured out the disgusting thoughts in his soul, showed me the dark evil in his heart. And now he is stepping closer, the excitement radiating from his body like a foul smell.
He thinks I am weak. He thinks he can manipulate me and subdue me. Kill me. He has no idea that my small frame and delicate features contain an evil that rivals his own. I finger the knife in my pocket and fight to keep a grin off my face.
This is it. This is my time. ~ Alessandra Torre

Evening," Zane said.
It was a pretty wordy opening for him.
Phoebe debated inviting him in, then decided it would be too much like an offer to sleep with him. Instead of stepping back and pointing to the bed, which was really what she wanted to do, she moved down the hallway, shutting the door behind her, and did her best to look unimpressed.
"Hi, Zane. How are the preparations coming?"
He gave her one of his grunts, then shrugged. She took that to mean, "Great. And thanks so much for asking."
They weren't standing all that close, but she was intensely aware of him. Despite the fact that he'd probably been up at dawn and that it was now close to ten, he still smelled good. He wasn't wearing his cowboy hat, so she could see his dark hair. Stubble defined his jaw. She wanted to rub her hands over the roughness, then maybe hook her leg around his hip and slide against him like the sex-starved fool she was turning out to be. ~ Susan Mallery

I thought about cricket a lot. I needed to get out of this bubble of mine. I found it in books and conversations with other people about other things. I was a curious person, and this was my release. I like being challenged intellectually. I hated at the end of the day to talk cricket to someone else. ~ Rahul Dravid

In Mexico City they somehow wandered into an exhibition of paintings by the beautiful Spanish exile Remedios Varo: in the central painting of a triptych, titled "Bordando el Manto Terrestre," were a number of frail girls with heart-shaped faces, huge eyes, spun-gold hair, prisoners in the top room of a circular tower, embroidering a kind of tapestry which spilled out the slit windows and into a void, seeking hopelessly to fill the void: for all the other buildings and creatures, all the waves, ships and forests of the earth were contained in the tapestry, and the tapestry was the world. Oedipa, perverse, had stood in front of the painting and cried. No one had noticed; she wore dark green bubble shades. For a moment she'd wondered if the seal around her sockets were tight enough to allow the tears simply to go on and fill up the entire lens space and never dry. She could carry the sadness of the moment with her that way forever, see the world refracted through those tears, those specific tears, as if indices as yet unfound varied in important ways from cry to cry. She had looked down at her feet and known, then, because of a painting, that what she stood on had only been woven together a couple thousand miles away in her own tower, was only by accident known as Mexico, and so Pierce had take her away from nothing, there'd been no escape. What did she so desire escape from? Such a captive maiden, having plenty of time to think, soon realizes that her tower, its height and arch ~ Thomas Pynchon

Fortunately, by the time I'd gotten to the stairs I had finished gasping and stepping on dead people, so I was pretty prepared for the next thing to startle me out of my skin. ~ April White

If you're using live bass versus orchestral bass, you've got to make sure that you're not stepping on the toes of the other elements, so you've got to balance it out. ~ Serj Tankian

I have found, that we often must realise, that we cannot be angry at people for simply not being capable of stepping out of their comfort zones to be decent human beings. You are born with this wild respect for people and you think it's all equal. And that's what hurts. Because it's not all equal, not all people are going to show up for you, not all people are going to do the decent thing for you, even if it's something that would be so easy for you to do. You can never make your standard into the standard for everyone. Some people are just frogs in a mud puddle, and really, they're actually perfectly fine with that! ~ C. JoyBell C.

It's easy to just see what you want to see in your own comfort bubble, but to really get out there and experience the suffering of animals is an awakening. I had to become proactive and take a stand. ~ Alison Eastwood

For some people, the beginning is a time of complete chaos. You see bits and pieces of what is before you. You have a sense of what it is you must set out to do. But nothing will form yet. When you sit down to write or paint or form movement, it's like stepping over a cliff or into a dense fog. All you can do is trust that this impending masterpiece is going to somehow manifest itself as you work. But you do know that there is something specific ahead, and you feel the excitement of that. ~ Vinita Hampton Wright

Bisceglia Pharmacy is a tiny, dusty relic tucked into a dying strip mall on the other side of the Kansas-Missouri state line. I see Liv's doubt as we pull up to the pharmacy and there's a dog chained up out front gnawing industriously on an old shoe.

"Uh," she says, stepping over the dog, who doesn't stop his chewing to look up, "is this like...a licensed pharmacy?"

"We're in Missouri now, princess. This is what shit looks like here."

Liv shoots me a look as we walk through the door - which is propped open with a rabbit-eared television set - and into the dimly lit pharmacy. "You know, it's not nice to be geographically snobby."

"I lived on the Missouri side of Kansas City until Mom died," I tell her. "So I feel a little entitled to some trash talk. Also this place was my first job. So I'm double entitled ~ Laurelin Paige

Very often, what is meant to be a stepping stone turns out to be a slab of wet cement that will harden around your foot if you do not take the next step soon enough. ~ Richelle E. Goodrich

It's not fear of striking out that makes me reluctant to step up to the plate. It's the fear of getting hit in the head by a 90 mph fastball, the pitcher coming off of the mound to stomp me with her cleats while I am down, the rest of the opposing team rushing out of the dugout hurling insults as they kick me and spit on me, while all along the crowd in the stands is cheering them on and laughing at my failure. So, no, it's not the fear of striking out that keeps me from stepping up to the plate. ~ Jim Copeland

I am, a shadow
that grows longer as the sun
moves, drawn out
on a thread of wonder.
If I bear burdens
they begin to be remembered
as gifts, goods, a basket
of bread that hurts
my shoulders but closes me
in fragrance. I can
eat as I go.
("Stepping Westward") ~ Denise Levertov

I've not won different awards - many, many times - so luckily I've practiced that whenever you are nominated for anything, you enter into this marvelous, fantabulous bubble called the bubble of nomination. The minute the envelope is opened and your name isn't called out, the bubble bursts. And no one calls you up the next day to say, 'So sorry you didn't win,' or 'You looked gorgeous - nothing. If you win, you get about another 24 hours in that lovely bubble and then - pop - you are slightly wet all over from the bubble and realize that you have to get on with real life. ~ Helen Mirren

Before he died in 2013, the great sociologist Robert Bellah said that his view of everything he'd studied across his life was tilted on its axis by this late recognition: when mammals began to bring forth offspring from the center of their bodies, spiritual life became possible. With apes and far more with humans, the period of necessary parental care - care in order for the offspring to survive - became longer and longer. The long helplessness of the child generated a sphere of softening, experimentation, and creativity in self-understanding and shared life. This is the biological groundwork for the axial move - stepping out of fear and into care beyond one's self. The religions apprehended this long ago and wove it into language; compassion in both Hebrew and Arabic derives from the word for womb. ~ Krista Tippett

Being with you . . ." he began, drawing my eyes back to his face. His were dazed, unfocused, like he was looking within and without. "Being with me?" I prompted after almost a minute, curious, a bubble of something reluctantly hopeful expanding in my chest. So of course, a joke slipped out. "Is as the prophesy foretold?" Abram's gaze sharpened on mine. He smiled, a real smile. His left dimple making its first appearance, stealing my breath before his words could. "It's living artistry, Mona." Abram's gaze turned cherishing, earnest. "Being with you is like living in a song. ~ Penny Reid

There was a sharp 'phut', no louder than a bubble of air escaping from a tube of toothpaste. No other noise at all, and suddenly Le Chiffre had grown another eye, a third eye on a level with the other two, right where the thick nose started to jut out below the forehead. It was a small black eye, without eyelashes or eyebrows. ~ Ian Fleming

The other day as I was stepping out of Star Grocery on Claremont Avenue with some pork ribs under my arm, the Berkeley sky cloudless, a smell of jasmine in the air, a car driving by with its window rolled down, trailing a sweet ache of the Allman Brothers' "Melissa," it struck me that in order to have reached only the midpoint of my life I will need to live to be 92. That's pretty old. If you live to be ninety-two, you've done well for yourself. I'd like to be optimistic, and I try to take care of my health, but none of my grandparents even made it past 76, three killed by cancer, one by Parkinson's disease. If I live no longer than any of them did, I have at most thirty years left, which puts me around sixty percent of the way through my time.



I am comfortable with the idea of mortality, or at least I always have been, up until now. I never felt the need to believe in heaven or an afterlife. It has been decades since I stopped believing-a belief that was never more than fitful and self-serving to begin with-in the possibility of reincarnation of the soul. I'm not totally certain where I stand on the whole "soul" question. Though I certainly feel as if I possess one, I'm inclined to disbelieve in its existence. I can live with that contradiction, as with the knowledge that my time is finite, and growing shorter by the day. It's just that lately, for the first time, that shortening has become perceptible. I can feel each tiny skyward lurch of the balloo ~ Michael Chabon

As far as the environment is concerned, I am becoming pessimistic because I do not see anybody stepping up and taking the long view approach. It seems like we're stuck in a tragedy of the commons where everyone is trying to contribute as little as possible to get out of this situation. ~ Frans De Waal

Despite being some of the most powerful people in the world, the top men in the Kremlin were scared of stepping out of line. Marxism-Leninism answered all questions, so the eventual decision would be infallibly correct. Anyone who had argued for a different outcome was therefore revealed to be culpably out of touch with orthodox thinking. Dimka sometimes wondered if it was this bad in the Vatican. ~ Ken Follett

Stepping lithe and incredulous from the study; of Karras, emerging bewildered from the kitchen while the nightmarish poundings and croakings continued. Merrin went calmly up the staircase, a slender hand like alabaster sliding upward on the banister. Karras came up beside Chris, and together they watched from below as Merrin entered Regan's bedroom and closed the door behind him. For a time there was silence. Then abruptly the demon laughed hideously and Merrin swiftly exited the room, closed the door, then moved quickly down the hall while behind him the bedroom door opened again and Sharon poked her head out, staring after him with an odd expression on her face. Merrin descended the staircase rapidly and put out his hand to the waiting Karras. ~ William Peter Blatty