50 posts tagged “quotable”
I must say a word about fear. It is life's only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life. It is a clever, treacherous adversary, how well I know. It has no decency, respects no law or convention, shows no mercy. It goes for your weakest spot, which it finds with unerring ease. It begins in your mind, always. One moment you are feeling calm, self-possessed, happy. Then fear, disguised in the garb of mild-mannered doubt, slips into your mind like a spy. Doubt meets disbelief and disbelief tries to push it out. But disbelief is a poorly armed foot soldier. Doubt does away with it with little trouble. You become anxious. Reason comes to do battle for you. You are reassured. Reason is fully equipped with the latest weapons technology. But, to your amazement, despite superior tactics and a number of undeniable victories, reason is laid low. You feel yourself weakening, wavering. Your anxiety becomes dread.
Fear next turns fully to your body, which is already aware that something terribly wrong is going on. Already your lungs have flown away like a bird and your guts have slithered away like a snake. Now your tongue drops dead like an opossum, while your jaw begins to gallop on the spot. Your ears go deaf. Your muscles begin to shiver as if they had malaria and your knees to shake as though they were dancing. Your heart strains too hard, while your sphincter relaxes too much. And so with the rest of your body. Every part of you, in the manner most suited to it, falls apart. Only your eyes work well. They always pay proper attention to fear.
Quickly you make rash decisions. You dismiss your last allies: hope and trust. There, you've defeated yourself. Fear, which is but an impression, has triumphed over year.
To build a scene, you have to accept. To build anything onstage, you have to accept what the other improviser initiates on stage. They say you’re doctors—you’re doctors. And then, you add to that: We’re doctors and we’re trapped in an ice cave. That’s the “-and.” And then hopefully they “yes-and” you back.
You have to keep your eyes open when you do this. You have to be aware of what the other performer is offering you, so that you can agree and add to it. And through these agreements, you can improvise a scene or a one-act play. And because, by following each other’s lead, neither of you are really in control. It’s more of a mutual discovery than a solo adventure. What happens in a scene is often as much a surprise to you as it is to the audience.
Well, you are about to start the greatest improvisation of all. With no script. No idea what’s going to happen, often with people and places you have never seen before. And you are not in control. So say yes. And if you’re lucky, you’ll find people who will say yes back.
Now, will saying yes get you in trouble at times? Will saying yes lead you to doing some foolish things? Yes it will. But don’t be afraid to be a fool. Remember, you cannot be both young and wise. Young people who pretend to be wise to the ways of the world are mostly just cynics. Cynicism masquerades as wisdom, but it is the farthest thing from it. Because cynics don’t learn anything. Because cynicism is a self-imposed blindness, a rejection of the world because we are afraid it will hurt us or disappoint us.
Cynics always say no. But saying yes begins things. Saying yes is how things grow. Saying yes leads to knowledge. “Yes” is for young people. So for as long as you have the strength to, say yes.
6. A mandarin fell in love with a courtesan. "I shall be yours," she told him, "when you have spent a hundred nights waiting for me, sitting on a stool, in my garden, beneath my window." But on the ninety-ninth night, the mandarin stood up, put his stool under his arm, and went away.
"But something went wrong—terribly wrong. The calm I had during those years was like a dormant illness or an allergy that doesn’t emerge until later in life, or something you don’t see coming because it’s coming from within: You are making yourself ill. I became seasick with contentment. It was nauseating daily, and I couldn’t still myself against a funny feeling that there had to be more to life than waking up every day beside the same person. To say I was bored would be to misunderstand boredom: I did not need to take up table tennis or ballroom dancing—I needed a sense that this wasn’t the end of the story. The idea of foreverwith any single person, even someone great whom I loved so much like Gregg, really did seem like what death actually is: a permanent stop. Love did not open up the world like a generous door, as it should to anyone getting married; instead it was the steel clamp of the iron maiden, shutting me behind its front metal hinge to asphyxiate slowly, and then suddenly. Every day would be the same, forever: The body, the conversation, it would never change—isn’t that the rhythm of prison?"
I was doing a search for large paper shopping bags in bulk for my (personal) business, and hilariously the video of Fiona Apple's "Paper Bag"came up in the results. I had never seen the video. Yet the words I know in my sleep. I don't have speakers on my work computer so I added the rough, crooned audio to Fiona's moving lips. So then this turned into a "session". I did the same improvised dubbing with "First Taste" and was about to do it with "Limp" but then I soon discovered I was getting the remembered lyrics to "Fast as You Can" confused and soon grew lost not knowing which song was what and how either properly went. I couldn't reorient myself by reading her lips because the video was of that sort of languid poses, and forelorn looks in mirrors, and stolen looks to someone possibly imagined off camera. So there were no lips to read just assumed sighs between open, pouty lips and hair... a lot of hair. Not talking about hair in volume but in various shapes and forms and utility. Draped over the face haphazardly. Tight bun high on the head with gentle little tendrils escaping to flirt with the face. Shaken and thrown in wild abandon due to whatever grand emotion that particular stanza and the director du vid dictated. I could be imagining all of this hair porn and remembering the video wrong because frankly I turned it off 15 seconds into it once I got my lyrics lost and so my interests in my personal karaoke moment ended. I closed the window as she poined her face close to the bathroom mirror, putting on red, red lipstick on her lips resulting in an open, pouty mouth. So I am positive I got the pouty and the mirror parts right but none of this is by any means related to my original intention which was to google for where I could buy paper bags. Which goes to show just how quickly one can be wildly distracted by the Internet. *snap!* Just like that.
And, again, completely unrelated to everything, I just want to add that it's damned near impossible to find a paper shopping bag large enough to easily fit the cupcake boxes in (these boxes fit 12 cupcakes just so you know). I even called the major paper suppliers and nothing. So this is frustrating. And the only bags I've seen that are perfect for my needs are the bags from Crumbs. But that's ridiculous. Can you imagine me using a bag with CRUMBS all colorful and loud all over it to drop off my cupcakes? Okay, I have to admit the mental image is making me chuckle... BUT STILL.
.end scene.
And I went crazy again today, looking for a strand to climb
Looking for a little hope
Baby said he couldn't stay, wouldn't put his lips to mine,
And a fail to kiss is a fail to cope
And I said, "Honey, I don't feel so good, don't feel justified
Come on put a little love here in my void"
He said, "It's all in your head"
And I said, "So's everything'" but he didn't get it
I thought he was a man but he was just a little boy
Hunger hurts, and I wanted him so bad, oh it killed
But I know I'm a mess he don't wanna clean up
I got to fold 'cause these hands are too shaky to hold
Hunger hurts, but starving works, when it costs too much to love
As Mr. Darcy walked off, Elizabeth felt her blood turn cold. She had never in her life been so insulted. The warrior code demanded she avenge her honour. Elizabeth reached down to her ankle, taking care not to draw attention. There, her hand met the dagger concealed beneath her dress. She meant to follow this proud Mr. Darcy outside and open his throat. But no sooner had she grabbed the handle of her weapon than a chorus of screams filled the assembly hall, immediately joined by the shattering of window panes. Unmentionables poured in, their movements clumsy yet swift; their burial clothing in a range of untidiness. Some wore gowns so tattered as to render them scandalous; other wore suits so filthy that one would assume they were assembled from little more than dirt and dried blood. Their flesh was in varying degrees of putrefaction; the freshly stricken were slightly green and pliant, whereas the longer dead were grey and brittle – their eyes and tongues long since turned to dust, and their lips pulled back into everlasting skeletal smiles.
How easy it is to create something sweet and beautiful, once you put your mind to it.
"When you really want something, the universe always conspires in your favor."
there wasn't anything *there* we could have lasted with... you do know that, don't you?
Marriages that last are not always devoid of conflict. Some couples
fight but also shower one another with affection. Other couples never
raise their voices yet also seldom praise one another or nuzzle. Both
styles can last. After observing the interactions of 2,000 couples,
John Gottman [1994] reported one indicator of marital success: at least
a five-to-one ratio of positive to negative interactions. Stable
marriages provide five times more instances of smiling, touching,
complimenting, and laughing than sarcasm, criticism, and insults. So,
if you want to predict which newlyweds will stay together, do not pay
attention to how passionately they are in love. The couples who make it
are more often those who restrain from putting down their partners. To
prevent a cancerous negativity, successful couples learn to fight fair
[to state feelings without insulting] and to steer conflict away from
chaos with comments like 'I know it's not your fault' or 'I'll just be
quiet for a moment and listen.'
'I didn't do a horrible thing. I saved my son. Isn't that what mothers are supposed to do?'
'What do you think mothers are supposed to do?' he asks.
Stay awake all night when an infant has a cold, as if she might be able to breathe for him. Learn how to speak pig latin, and make a pact to talk that way for an entire day. Bake at least one cake with every ingredient in the pantry, just to see how it will taste.
Fall in love with your son a little more every day.
"Things are going so well. We're volleying words back and forth. Everything she says, I have something I can say back. We're sparking, and part of me just wants to sit back and watch. We're clicking. Not because a part of me is fitting into a part of her. But because our words are clicking to form sentences and our sentences are clicking into each other to form dialogue and our dialogue is clicking together to form this scene from this ongoing movie that's as comfortable as it is unrehearsed."
the moment i met you I saw that you were quite unconscious of what you really are, of what you really might be. There was so much in you that charmed me that I felt I must tell you something about yourself.
