Tough Times And Getting Through Them Quotes

We need to leave as soon as possible."
"Okay," Luce said. "I have to go home, then, pack, get my passport..." Her mind whirled in a hundred directions as she started making a mental to-do list. Her parents would be at the mall for at least another couple of hours, enough time for her to dash in and get her things together...
"Oh, cute." Annabelle laughed, flitting over to them, her feet inches off the ground. Her wings were muscular and dark silver like a thundercloud, protruding through the invisible slits in her hot-pink T-shirt. "Sorry to butt in but...you've never traveled with an angel before, have you?"
Sure she had. The feeling of Daniel's wings soaring her body through the air was as natural as anything. Maybe her flights had been brief, but they'd been unforgettable. They were when Luce felt closest to him: his arms threaded around her waist, his heart beating close to hers, his white wings protecting them, making Luce feel unconditionally and impossibly loved.
She had flown with Daniel dozens of times in dreams, but only three times in her waking hours: once over the hidden lake behind Sword & Cross, another time along the coast at Shoreline, and down from the clouds to the cabin just the previous night.
"I guess we've never flown that far together," she said at last.
"Just getting to first base seems to be a problem for you two," Cam couldn't resist saying.
Daniel ignored him. "Under normal circumstances, I think you'd enjoy t ~ Lauren Kate

The five stages of model development. - Donald Knuth, Stanford computer scientist Knuth discovered that computer program development goes through five stages. These steps also apply to building models, and I rigorously adhere to them in my consulting work. 1. Decide what you want the model to do. 2. Decide how to build the model. 3. Build the model. 4. Debug the model. 5. Trash stages 1 through 4 and start again, now that you know what you really wanted in the first place. Once you realize that step 5 is inevitable, you become more willing to discard bad models early rather than continually to patch them up. In fact, I recommend getting to step 5 many times by building an evolving set of prototypes. This is consistent with an emerging style of system development known as Extreme Programming.2 To get a large model to work you must start with a small model that works, not a large model that doesn't work. - Alan Manne, Stanford energy economist ~ Sam L. Savage

Hard times build determination and inner strength. Through them we can also come to appreciate the uselessness of anger. Instead of getting angry nurture a deep caring and respect for troublemakers because by creating such trying circumstances they provide us with invaluable opportunities to practice tolerance and patience. ~ Dalai Lama XIV

I hope and understand that people are getting a better recognition that food stamps is a program that really helps America, helps families in need. It's not a government handout. If anything, it's a safety net that helps people through difficult times and bridges them towards stability. ~ Cory Booker

This kind of neighborhood did not please him; he had seen it a million times, duplicated throughout the face of the earth. It had been from such as this that he had fled, early in his life, to use his sixness as a method of getting out. And now he had come back.
He did not object to the people: he saw them as trapped here, the ordinaries, who through no fault of their own had to remain. They had not invented it; they did not like it; they endured it, as he had not had to. In fact, he felt guilty, seeing their grim faces, their turned-down mouths. Jagged, unhappy mouths. ~ Philip K. Dick

So you have chosen aloneness. You have chosen the security and the relative freedom of solitude, because there is no risk involved. You can stay up every night and watch your TV shows and eat ice cream out of the box and scroll through your Tumblr and never let your brain sit still, not even for a moment. You can fill your days up with books and coffees and trips to the store where you forget what you wanted the second you walk in the automatic sliding door. You can do so many little, pointless things throughout the day that all you can think of is how badly you want to sleep, how heavy your whole body is, how much your feet hurt. You can wear yourself out again and again on the pavement, and you do, and it feels good. No one will ever bridge that gap and point to your stomach or your hair or your eyes in the mirror and magically make you see the wonderful things about getting to be next to you. And maybe that's it, after all, this fear that no one will ever truly feel about you the way you want to be felt about. Maybe what you want is someone to make you love yourself, to put sense into all that positive rhetoric, to make it so the aloneness of TV and blasting music in your ears at all times isn't the most happy place you can think of. Maybe you want someone who makes you so sure of how wonderful things are that you cannot help but to tell them your feelings first, even at the risk of being humiliated. Because you will know that, when you're telling them you love them, what ~ Chelsea Fagan

Often, I'm spending months with a person in a very intimate context, getting to know the ins and outs of what they ate for breakfast, not to mention dredging up the most traumatic experiences of their lives, digging through their documents and photographs from difficult times, all of that. And that process, I think, can be extraordinarily strange for subjects who've never been interviewed before, especially if you don't acquaint them from the get-go with what you're trying to do, what it entails, and why you care. ~ Sarah Stillman

Sometimes I think my ability to concentrate is being nibbled away by the internet; other times I think it's being gulped down in huge, Jaws-shaped chunks. In those quaint days before the internet, once you made it to your desk there wasn't much to distract you. You could sit there working or you could just sit there. Now you sit down and there's a universe of possibilities – many of them obscurely relevant to the work you should be getting on with – to tempt you. To think that I can be sitting here, trying to write something about Ingmar Bergman and, a moment later, on the merest whim, can be watching a clip from a Swedish documentary about Don Cherry – that is a miracle (albeit one with a very potent side-effect, namely that it's unlikely I'll ever have the patience to sit through an entire Bergman film again).

Then there's the outsourcing of memory. From the age of 16, I got into the habit of memorising passages of poetry and compiling detailed indexes in the backs of books of prose. So if there was a passage I couldn't remember, I would spend hours going through my books, seeking it out. Now, in what TS Eliot, with great prescience, called "this twittering world", I just google the key phrase of the half-remembered quote. Which is great, but it's drained some of the purpose from my life.

Exactly the same thing has happened now that it's possible to get hold of out-of-print books instantly on the web. That's great too. But one of the side incentives to ~ Geoff Dyer

I stood on the street corner. I thought about chasing after her, but she was churning swiftly through the neighborhood -- she was already almost a block away -- so instead I entered a coffee shop. This is why I was on the street. I was going to a coffee shop, and I was buying a coffee, and then I was walking to class, and then I would teach, and then during office hours I would reassure the students who needed reassuring, and I would be tough on the students who could take it, and if someone cried in my office for reasons unrelated but maybe sort of related to the imperfect short story they'd written, I would tell them that fiction makes you cry, the fiction you read though more often it's the shitty fiction you write that makes you cry, and I would also be thinking, You poor person, you have no idea what awaits you. A life awaits you, like a serious fucking life. This is what I would want to say. And then I would go home to my serious fucking life, and it would be so ridiculously unserious; it would involve soup spills and dirty dishes and lengthy logic proofs meant to coerce tired, inarticulate people to bed, and I would think how lucky I was to have this unserious life, i.e., to be forced to do somewhat or even thoroughly banal things every day. Because what awaits you if you don't? What kind of life awaits you then? A life where you don't calmly think, as you're scraping up the crystallized juice rings before showering before getting dressed before buying coffee before te ~ Heidi Julavits

There was never anybody before you," she said. "I just wanted to say that. And when I did what I do, and it opened a crack in me like it did last night, there was nobody there to hold on to me. I didn't want anyone to hold on to me. Until you. And I got through and I got by, and it was okay. But I think, maybe, if I'd just kept getting through and getting by, I'd have come to a point where I couldn't do it anymore. And if I couldn't do it anymore, it'd be the end of me, Roarke. So when you hold on to me, You're helping me stand up, one more time. And the dead, you're standing for them, too. I just wanted to say that." She went out quickly, and left him staring at her. ~ J.D. Robb

The last time I saw Collin was in 1917, at the foot of Mort-Homme.

Before the great slaughter, Collin'd been an avid angler. On that day, he was standing at the hole, watching maggots swarm among blow flies on two boys that we couldn't retrieve for burial without putting our own lives at risk.

And there, at the loop hole, he thought of his bamboo rods, his flies and the new reel he hadn't even tried out yet.

Collin was imaging himself on the riverbank, wine cooling in the current his stash of worms in a little metal box and a maggot on his hook, writhing like… Holy shit. Were the corpses getting to him?

Collin. The poor guy didn't even have time to sort out his thoughts.

In that split second, he was turned into a slab of bloody meat. A white hot hook drilled right through him and churned through his guts, which spilled out of a hole in his belly.

He was cleared out of the first aid station. The major did triage. Stomach wounds weren't worth the trouble. There were all going to die anyway, and besides, he wasn't equipped to deal with them.

Behind the aid station, next to a pile of wood crosses, there was a heap of body parts and shapeless, oozing human debris laid out on stretchers, stirred only be passing rats and clusters of large white maggots.

But on their last run, the stretcher bearers carried him out after all… Old Collin was still alive.

From the aid station to the ambu ~ Jacques Tardi

Overcomers are not perfect. They fail just like the rest of us, but they keep on getting up, keep on repenting, and keep on being willing to surrender themselves to Christ and letting Him, who is the only perfect One, work through them. ~ Nancy Missler

Getting back to Audrey, though, I should really feel complimented that she won't ever touch me because she likes me more than anyone else. It makes perfect sense, really, doesn't it?
If she ever gets down or depressed, i can make out the figure of her through the front window of the shack. She comes in and we drink cheap beer or wine and watch a movie or all three. Something old and long like Ben-Hur that stretches into the night. She'll be next to me on the couch in her flannel shirt and jeans that have been cut into shorts,and eventually, when she's asleep, I'll bring a blanket out and cover her up.
I kiss her cheek.
I stroke her hair.
I think of how she lives alone, just like me, and how she never had any real family, and how she only has sex with people. She never lets any love get in the way. I think she had a family once, but it was one of those beat-the-crap-out-of-each-other situations. There's no shortage of them around here. I think she loved them and all she ever did was hurt her.
That's why she refuses to love.
Anybody.
I guess she feels better off that way, and who can blame her?
When she sleeps on my couch, I think about all that. Everytime. I cover her up, then go to the bed and dream.
With my eyes open. ~ Markus Zusak

Such disappointments, betrayals and reconciliations were the stuff of married life, but she and Jack had gone through them before the wedding. Now, at least, she felt confident that she knew him. Nothing was likely to surprise her. It was a funny way to do things, but it might be better than making your vows first and getting to know your spouse afterward. ~ Ken Follett

Friends and family came and went, sometimes helping her with her tears, other times making her laugh. But even in her laughter there was something missing. She never seemed to be truly happy; she just seemed to be passing time while she waited for something else. She was tired of just existing; she wanted to live. But what was the point in living when there was no life in it? These questions went through her mind over and over until she reached the point of not wanting to wake up from her dreams
they were what felt real.
Deep down, she knew it was normal to feel like this, she didn't particularly think she was losing her mind. She knew that one day she would be happy again and that this feeling would just be a distant memory. It was getting to that day that was the hard part. ~ Cecelia Ahern

We live in a culture that teaches us that "men" are the sexual aggressors and pursuers. We also live in a world where most women, trans, and non-binary folks have had negative experiences with men who are hitting on them. These factors tend to lead to some big gender differences for those exploring non-monogamy.

Cisgender men often struggle when they first enter the world of non-monogamy. Within consensual non-monogamy (CNM) communities, most folks who sleep with cis men choose their partners based on referrals and endorsements. As in the world of business, it truly is who you know. Cis men who have been in the communities longer have dated and interacted with more people, and, therefore, have more word of mouth. It is an unfortunate reality that many, especially cisgender women, will not date men they don't already know about through their friends and communities.

So, if you're a cis man exploring CNM, expect that it may take a while before you start seeing the kind of attention that others get. Focus on being kind, respectful, and honest. Respect the needs and boundaries of everyone with whom you interact. Spend lots of time getting to know other people simply as people - especially of your preferred gender to date - and form genuine friendships and connections with them free from any pressure to become sexual. ~ Liz Powell

You just, like, hate yourself? You hate being yourself?"
"There's no self to hate. It's like, when I look into myself, there's no actual me - just a bunch of thoughts and behaviors and circumstances. And a lot of them just don't feel like they're mine. They're not things I want to think or do or whatever. And when I do look for the, like, Real Me, I never find it. It's like those nesting dolls, you know? The ones that are hollow, and then when you open them up, there's a smaller doll inside, and you keep opening hollow dolls until eventually you get to the smallest one, and it's solid all the way through. But with me, I don't think there is one that is solid. They just keep getting smaller. ~ John Green

I griped about it at lunch one day to Bill Weist and Dr. Leslie Squier, our visiting psychologists from Reed College. I'd been trying to train one otter to stand on a box, I told them. No problem getting the behavior; as soon as I put the box in the enclosure, the otter rushed over and climbed on top of it. She quickly understood that getting on the box earned her a bite of fish, But. As soon as she got the picture, she began testing the parameters. 'Would you like me lying down on the box? What if I just put three feet on the box? Suppose I hang upside down from the edge of the box? Suppose I stand on it and look under it at the same time? How about if I put my front paws on it and bark?' For twenty minutes she offered me everything imaginable except just getting on the box and standing there. It was infuriating, and strangely exhausting. The otter would eat her fish and then run back to the box and present some new, fantastic variation and look at me expectantly (spitefully, even, I thought) while I struggled once more to decide if what she was doing fit my criteria or not.

My psychologist friends flatly refused to believe me; no animal acts like that. If you reinforce a response, you strengthen the chance that the animal will repeat what it was doing when it was reinforced; you don't precipitate some kind of guessing game.

So I showed them. We all went down to the otter tank, and I took the other otter and attempted to get it to swim through a small ~ Karen Pryor

Hold on to me!" Tedros yelled, hacking briars with his training sword.Dazed, Agatha clung to his chest as he withstood thorn lashes with moans of pain. Soon he had the upper hand and pulled Agatha from the Woods towards the spiked gates, which glowed in recognition and pulled apart, cleaving a narrow path for the two Evers. As the gates speared shut behind them,Agatha looked up at limping Tedros, crisscrossed with bloody scratches, blue shirt shredded away.
"Had a feeling Sophie was getting in through the Woods," he panted, hauling her up into slashed arms before she could protest. "So Professor Dovey gave me permission to take some fairies and stakeout the outer gates. Should have known you'd be here trying to catch her yourself."
Agatha gaped at him dumbly.
"Stupid idea for a princess to take on witches alone," Tedros said, dripping sweat on her pink dress.
"Where is she?" Agatha croaked. "Is she safe?"
"Not a good idea for princesses to worry about witches either," Tedros said, hands gripping her waist. Her stomach exploded with butterflies.
"Put me down," she sputtered -
"More bad ideas from the princess."
"Put me down!"Tedros obeyed and Agatha pulled away.
"I'm not a princess!" she snapped, fixing her collar.
"If you say so," the prince said, eyes drifting downward.Agatha followed them to her gashed legs, waterfalls of brilliant blood. She saw blood blurring - Tedros smiled.
"One . . . two . . . three . . ."She f ~ Soman Chainani

And now I am engulfed in this new flavor, so different from the light but humorless flavor of the Anapa and the thick bitter taste of the Mumbanyo, this rich deep resonant complex flavor that I am only getting my first sips of and yet how do I explain these differences to an average American who will take one look at the photographs and see black men & women with bones through their noses and lump them in a pile marked Savages? ~ Lily King

i g l o o


his name was Eddie and he had a
big white dog
with a curly tail
a huskie
like one of those that pulled sleighs
up near the north pole
Igloo he called him
and Eddie had a bow and arrow
and every week or two
he'd send an arrow
into the dog's side
then run into his mother's house
through the yelping
saying that Igloo had fallen on
the arrow.
that dog took quite a few arrows and
managed to
survive
but I saw what really happened and didn't
like Eddie very much.
so when I broke Eddie's leg
in a sandlot football game
that was my way of getting even
for Igloo.

his parents threatened to sue my
parents
claiming I did it on purpose because
that's what Eddie
told them.

well, nobody had any money anyhow
and when Eddie's father got a job
in San Diego
they moved away and left the
dog.
we took him in.

Igloo turned out to be rather dumb
did not respond to very much
had no life or joy in him
just stuck out his tongue
panted
slept most of the time
when he wasn't eating
and although he wiped his ass
up and down the lawn after
defecating
he usually had a large fragrant smear of
brown
under his tail

when he was run over by an
icecream truck
3 or 4 months later
and died in a stream of scarlet
Charles Bukowski

And her. What would she do without him?

She's not special, not like BB and Ghostly, who awe her with their intelligence and the things they're capable of, all their humbling potential. All she does is write - a lot - because it's fun. She's under no illusions, she's popular through quantity not quality, she's not bad but she is not Blackbindings and she never will be. She writes because it's fun. And she thinks about him, and what he does.

She works three jobs she hates, just to keep the bills paid. She wanted to get into journalism but she can't afford the internships. She already sees what her life will be like, she sees the path ahead, she knows there's no way off; she'll never not be working three dead end jobs she hates, she'll marry her boyfriend and unless there's an accident they'll decide almost too late that fuck it they'd better have those kids now or never, because they never will be able to afford them; she'll never do anything amazing, never be anything amazing, just a person in a world full of people, getting by.

But there's him. And every time she faces life and thinks she can't bear it, there's him. If he can be so brave, can't she manage the littlest bravery? Because - because her little pointless life that will never mean anything, that will have vanished beyond notice within hardly more than a hundred years if she has those kids to remember her, her dragging, struggling life of bills and broken pipes and fuck it it's anothe ~ Rainjoy

We have a deal."
"The hell you do!" Maria cried out, dashing into the room. She barely noticed that the others stayed behind in the hall.
Nathan looked disconcerted by her appearance, and Oliver looked alarmed. "Leave this to me, Maria," he said tersely.
"The only way that scoundrel is getting your mother's pearls," she shot back," is if I strangle him with them." She marched up and snatched the box from Nathan. "Besides, you already have them to me."
"And you left them behind," Oliver reminded her. "Gran said you refused to keep them."
"Well, I want them now."
"At the risk of being dragged through the courts?" he said, coming to her side. "Of having your name maligned by this vermin?" He lowered his voice. "Do you really want him examining every action you've taken in the past two weeks, having it all laid out before a judge?"
She could tell he was thinking of her appearance at the brothel and the unpleasantness there, not to mention her public betrothal to him. "Let him do his worst." She had an ace in the hole.
She was about to call for Miss Kinsley when Oliver said, "Hyatt won't let go of this matter without some financial consideration. With 125,000 pounds at stake-"
Nathan's bark of laughter cut him off. "Is that what she's told you her half of the company is worth, Lord Stoneville?" Nathan sneered. "Now I understand why a marquess is sniffing around her."
Oliver's eyes turned a dangerous shade of black. He seized the ma ~ Sabrina Jeffries

But then male directors also have a hard time getting their movies made ... not as hard as women but it's a tough time for any movie this size. And that particular movie [The Hurt Locker] was so specific. It couldn't hurt, of course, and I'm really glad for her, but I don't know how much it will change things, if at all. The film industry is still so sexist. ~ Nicole Holofcener

What is important is not getting intoxicated with a good feeling or getting intoxicated even with an insight. These take many forms in our practice. We go through times of great release, where there has been physical holding for what feels like forever, and something opens up and releases. ~ Sharon Salzberg

And sometimes I get carried away, that's all. If you weren't so...judgemental all the time-"
"Am I? I don't think I am . I try not to be. I just don't..." She stopped herself speaking, shook her head. "I know you've been through a lot, in the last few years, and I've tried to understand that, really I have, with your mum and all, but..."
"Go on," he said.
"I just don't think you're the person I used to know. You're not my friend anymore. That's all."
He could think of nothing to say to this, so they stood in silence, until Emma put her hand out, took two fingers of his hand, squeezed them in her palm.
"Maybe...maybe this is it, then," she said. "Maybe it's just over."
"Over? What's over?"
"Us. You and me. Friendship. There are things I needed to talk to you about, Dex. About Ian and me. If you're my friend I should be able to talk to you but I can't, and if I can't talk to you, well, what is the point of you? Of us?"
"'What's the point?'"
"You said yourself, people change, no use getting sentimental about it. Move on, find someone else."
"Yeah, but I didn't mean us..."
"Why not?"
"Because we're....us. We're Dex and Em. Aren't we?"
Emma shrugged. "Maybe we've grown out of each other."
He said nothing for a moment, then spoke. "So, do you think I've grown out of you, or you've grown out of me?"
She wiped her nose with the back of her hand. "I think you think I'm....dreary. I think you think I cramp your ~ David Nicholls

Our minds are like a hotel. The manager can't keep people from coming into the lobby, but he can keep them from getting a room. It is the same with our thoughts. It is not a sin when an impure thought goes through our minds. The sin comes when we give it a room and let it settle down there. ~ O. S. Hawkins

The battle for our lives, and the lives and souls of our children, our husbands, our friends, our families, our neighbors, and our nation is waged on our knees. When we don't pray, it's like sitting on the sidelines watching those we love and care about scrambling through a war zone, getting shot at from every angle. When we do pray, however, we're in the battle alongside them, approaching God's power on their behalf. If we also declare the Wordog God in our prayers, then we wield a powerful weapon against which no enemy can prevail. ~ Stormie O'martian

Hopefully as you get older, you start to learn how to live with your demon. It's hard at first. Some people give their demon so much room that there is no space in their head or bed for love. They feed their demon and it gets really strong and then it makes them stay in abusive relationships or starve their beautiful bodies. But sometimes, you get a little older and get a little bored of the demon. Through good therapy and friends and self-love you can practice treating the demon like a hacky, annoying cousin. Maybe a day even comes when you are getting dressed for a fancy event and it whispers, "You aren't pretty," and you go, "I know, I know, now let me find my earrings." Sometimes you say, "Demon, I promise you I will let you remind me of my ugliness, but right now I am having hot sex so I will check in later. ~ Amy Poehler

The flower-covered grave of the saint in the inner room could be seen dimly through the narrow doorway. In front of it was a wide vestibule where about two dozen people were seated in a circle. One of them was singing lustily some Persian verses, while others kept the time by clapping their hands; they joined in the refrain which was sung in chorus. Like rising tidal waves, the tempo of the singing was getting faster and faster, the clapping became more frantic and heads rolled from side to side, keeping time with the tempestuous melody. Eyes were closed and everyone was lost in the surging waves of emotion that seemed to flow out of the Sufistic poetry of the great Roomi. Then, to his amazement Anwar saw a man in the centre of the crowd open his eyes and stare vacantly. For a moment this man was silent, ominously silent and motionless in the midst of the emotional storm that raged around him. Then he was caught by a sudden frenzy, his whole body quivered and moved, beating time to the song which by now had reached a weird and frightening crescendo, faster and faster, louder and louder. The man's hands rose high in the air and as if clutching at an unseen rope, he raised himself and started to dance, wildly, ecstatically, tearing his clothes and pulling his hair, completely unselfconscious and unrestrained, oblivious of everything by some mysterious inner urge that demanded expression in this wild manner. And then the song died on the lips of the singer, the waves of emotion ~ Khwaja Ahmad Abbas

Fully engrossed, until now, in picturing romantic ways of seeing him and getting to know him and certain she would carry them out as soon as she wished, she had been living on that yearning and that hope, without, perhaps, realizing it. But this desire had implanted itself into her by sending out a thousand imperceptible roots, which had plunged into all her most unconscious minutes of happiness or melancholy, filling them with a new sap without her knowing where it came from. And now this desire had been ripped out and tossed away as impossible. She felt lacerated, suffering horribly in her entire self, which had been suddenly uprooted; and from the depths of her sorrow through the abruptly exposed lies of her hope, she saw the reality of her love. ~ Marcel Proust

I'm fine with marrying Tove."
"You're 'fine' with marrying him?" Willa laughed and looped her arm through Matt's. "How romantic."
"You should've seen the proposal," I said.
"Where is the ring,by the way?" Willa asked, looking at my hands. "Is it getting sized?"
"I don't know." I held my hands out to look at them,as if I expected a ring to magically appear. "He didn't give me one."
"That's horrible! ~ Amanda Hocking

As women of the western world, we see our sisters in other lands being raped, maimed and even executed simply for trying to exercise the most basic freedoms, such as taking a bus alone or wearing a bright red sweater. And when we look at our own world, we see that it too still lacks equality for the sexes.
It's a terrible thing to go through one's entire lifetime not getting to do all the things we dream of doing just because others say we're not permitted to do them, and to know that they will hurt us if we try.
But far, far worse than that is when there's not a thing or a person outside that's stopping us from living exactly as we wish, but we stop ourselves; internally we do not give ourselves permission, simply because we're too scared of what will happen if we dare. ~ PatriciaV. Davis

Six times their weight (an acceleration of 6-g). Most riders, unless they were off-duty astronauts or high-performance pilots wearing g-suits, would be rendered unconscious by this force. There would be no oxygen supply getting through to the brain at all. Typically, fairground rides with child riders aim to keep accelerations below 2-g, and those for adults experience at most 4-g. ~ Anonymous

Mindfulness is developing an awareness of the thoughts and feelings that we move through without getting drawn into the meanings or taking action or getting sucked into the story. Like house guests, eventually they all leave. We become more attuned to being a container for those things and less identified with them. ~ Barnet Bain

Parents need to realize that the world is getting complicated every second. With new problems, new diseases, new habits. They have to realize the vast probability of their kids being victims of this age, this complicated era. Your kids could be exposed to problems that no kind of therapy can help. Your kids could be brainwashed by themselves to believe in insane theories that drive them crazy. Most kids will go through this stage. The lucky ones will understand. They will grow out of them. The most unlucky ones will live in these problems. Grow in them and never move forward. They will cut themselves, overdose on drugs, take up excessive drinking and smoking, for the slightest problems in their lives.
You can't blame these kids for not being thankful or satisfied with what they have. Their mentality eludes them from the reality. ~ Thisuri Wanniarachchi

There she is," Helen's voice reported directly into Gansey's ears; in the helicopter, they all wore headsets to allow them to converse through the ceaseless noise of the blades and the engine. "Gansey's girlfriend."
Ronan's snort barely made it through his headset, but Gansey had heard it often enough to know it was there.
Blue said, "She must be pretty big to see her from up here."
"Henrietta," Helen replied. She peered to the left of the helo as she banked. "They're getting married. They haven't set a date yet."
"If you're going to embarrass me, I'll throw you out and fly myself," Gansey said from the seat beside her. ~ Maggie Stiefvater

Spiritual assistance isn't there to make things easy and have everything go your way, but to help you grow into the fuller version of who you are. Rather than revealing that you're on the wrong track, shake-up and breakup often indicate that you're really starting to get somewhere. Of course, it's hard to feel this way while getting battered around by the severe crosswinds of our time, but that's when you most need to know it.

In the Western world we lack a clear set of guidelines for times like these. We lack meaningful rites of passage. We fail to equip people for knowing what to expect at key crossroads of the soul. We lack substantial guides for teaching individuals how to stay with their deep inner truth when all hell breaks loose. We get thrown into extreme life-changing passages like birth, first blood, first sex, marriage, pregnancy, child-bearing, divorce and death with only superficial guidance, and no deep cultural support for grasping the full significance of what we're coming out of and going into. So disruptions along the way don't usually appear as well-designed hurdles of initiation in a spiritual journey. Usually they appear as impossible dilemmas that bust your ass and belie evidence of any greater design.

Major rites of passage in the Western world rarely come in the form of sacred rituals but are embedded within mundane circumstance. It takes special perception to recognize the initiatory path through the chaos. It takes a shamanic pe ~ Mark Borax

But I say, really, you know, I am an old friend of the family. Why, by Jove, now I remember, there's a photograph of me in the drawing-room. Well, I mean, that shows you!"
"If there is," said the policeman.
"I've never seen it," said the parlourmaid.
I absolutely hated this girl.
"You would have seen it if you had done your dusting more conscientiously," I said severely. And I meant it to sting, by Jove!
"It is not a parlourmaid's place to dust the drawing-room," she sniffed haughtily.
"No," I said bitterly. "It seems to be a parlourmaid's place to lurk about and hang about and - er - waste her time fooling about in the garden with policemen who ought to be busy about their duties elsewhere."
"It's a parlourmaid's place to open the front door to visitors. Them that don't come in through windows."
I perceived that I was getting the loser's end of the thing. ~ P.G. Wodehouse

Sylvie's sort of pregnant. Well not sort of. She is. Pregnant. Actually pregnant with a baby.'
'Oh Dexter! Do you know the father? I'm kidding! Congratulations, Dex. God, aren't you meant to space your bombshells out a bit. Not just drop them all at once?'
She held his face in both hands, looked at it.
'You're getting married?-'
'Yes'
-'And you're going to be a father?'
'I know! Fuck me a father!'
'Is that allowed? I mean will they let you?'
'Apparently'
'I think it's wonderful. Fucking hell, Dexter, I turn my back for one minute ... !'
She hugged him once again her arms high round his neck. She felt drunk, full of affection and a certain sadness too, as if something was coming to an end. She wanted to say something along these lines, but thought it best to do this through a joke.
'Of course you've destroyed any chance I had of future happiness, but I'm delighted for you, really. ~ David Nicholls

How? How did you get Torin to Hex Hall?"
Dad blinked rapidly, and at first, I thought he was surprised by my question. Then I realized that, no, he was fighting tears. Seeing my father, who practically had a PhD in Stiff Upper Lip, on the verge of crying because he was so happy to see me made my own eyes sting. Then he cleared his throat, straightened his shoulders, and said, "It was exceedingly difficult."
I laughed through my tears. "I bet."
"It was Torin's idea," someone said behind me, and I turned to see Izzy standing there. Like my parents and her sister, she was dressed in jeans and a black jacket, although she also had a black cap pulled over her bright hair. "We had tons of old spell books, and after you and Cal disappeared, he started looking through them. Found a spell that would let him travel to a different mirror."
"Of course, the problem was finding your mirror," Aislinn said, coming out of the darkness.
"Aren't you afraid that he'll permanently peace out from his mirror and start hanging out in girls' locker rooms or something?"
Aislinn's eyes slid to Izzy. "Torin has his reasons for wanting to stay with us," she said, and even in the dim light, I saw red creepy up Izzy's cheeks. Maybe one day, I'd get to the bottom of whatever was going on there. Preferably once I was done getting to the bottom of the thousand other things on my agenda. ~ Rachel Hawkins

Bonhoeffer helps us see that a youth minister is not someone who heaves theology onto young people, getting them to know stuff, but is rather a minister of the gospel that stands near the concrete humanity of young people, sharing in their experience, helping them wrestle with God's action in and through their concrete lives. ~ Andrew Root

Every day I am getting to know people, at any rate their circumstances, and sometimes one is able to see through their stories into themselves-- and at the same time one thing continues to impress me: here I meet the people as they are, far from the masquerade of "the Christian world"; people with passions, criminal types, small people with small aims, small wages and small sins-- all in all they are people who feel homeless in both senses, and who begin to thaw when one speaks to them with kindness-- real people; I can only say that I have gained the impression that it is just these people who are much more under grace than under wrath, and that it is the Christian world which is more under wrath than grace. ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer

This book is about those other pieces, and getting them in place. It's about understanding the external myths that have broken down; the same ones that created the massive American middle class, which is now dying, and left us with the Choose Yourself era in the fallout. People are walking around blind. If you are the one who can see, you will be able to navigate through this new world. You will be the beacon that will enhance the lives of everyone around you and, in doing so, trigger the actual law of nature that says when you enhance everyone around you, you can't help but enhance yourself. ~ James Altucher

We all view life through the lens of these experiences, but the Narcissist has something more, not just a lens but a prism that refracts and distorts incoming messages to avoid the intolerable feeling of shame. This means that you are never in control of how these people perceive you, or when you will be assaulted with some defensive maneuver that deflects their shame, prevents their deflation, or reinflates them after narcissistic injury.
Narcissists constantly dump – or project – unwanted parts of themselves onto other people. They then begin to behave as if others possess these unwanted pieces of themselves, and they may even succeed in getting others to feel as if they actually have those traits or feelings. This is an unconscious process for both the dumper and the dumpee, but what it means is that you end up being treated like the dirt they've brushed off their own psyches, or feeling the humiliation, the anger, the vulnerability, and worthlessness that they cannot tolerate themselves. ~ Sandy Hotchkiss

I have only one memory of getting here, and even that is just a single image: black ink curling around the side of a neck, the corner of a tattoo, and the gentle sway that could only mean he was carrying me.
He turns off the bathroom light and gets an ice pack from the refrigerator in the corner of the room. As he walks toward me, I consider closing my eyes and pretending to be asleep,but then our eyes meet and it's too late.
"Your hands," I croak.
"My hands are none of your concern," he replies. He rests his knee on the mattress and leans over me,slipping the ice pack under my head. Before he pulls away,I reach out to touch the cut on the side of his lip but stop when I realize what I am about to do, my hand hovering.
What do you have to lose? I ask myself. I touch my fingertips lightly to his mouth.
"Tris," he says, speaking against my fingers. "I'm all right."
"Why were you there?" I ask, letting my hand drop.
"I was coming back from the control room. I heard a scream."
"What did you do to them?" I say.
"I deposited Drew at the infirmary a half hour ago," he says. "Peter and Al ran. Drew claimed they were just trying to scare you.At least,I think that's what he was trying to say."
"He's in bad shape?"
"He'll live," he replies. He adds bitterly, "In what condition, I can't say."
It isn't right to wish pain on other people just because they hurt me first. But white-hot triumph races through me at the thought of Drew ~ Veronica Roth