People without an internalized symbolic system can all too easily become captives of the media.
Go ahead. You're not going to walk in on anyone. I'm home alone." "The whole night?" Immediately, I realized it might not have been the smartest thing to say. "Dorothea will be coming soon." That was a lie. Dorothea was long gone. It was close to midnight. "Dorothea?" "Our housekeeper. She's old- but strong. Very strong." I tried to squeeze past him. Unsuccessfully. "Sounds frightening," he said, retrieving the key from the lock. He held it out for me. " She can clean a toilet inside and out in under a minute. More like terrifying.
The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.
The best current evidence is that media are mere vehicles that deliver instruction but do not influence student achievement any more than the truck that delivers groceries causes change in our nutrition.
What self-control doesn't mean is mindless self-sacrifice or knee-jerk self-denial. On the contrary, it represents an affirmation of self, for it requires not the negation of instinct but its integration into a more complete form of character-one that takes account of more than just immediate pleasures and pains. The self-control I'm talking about means acting in keeping with your highest level of reflection.
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
Hope like that, as I thought before, doesn’t make you a weak person. It’s hopelessness that makes you weak. Hope makes you stronger, because it brings with it a sense of reason. Not a reason for how or why they were taken from you, but a reason for you to live. Because it’s a maybe. A ‘maybe someday things won’t always be this shit.’ And that ‘maybe’ immediately makes the shittiness better.
Genuine love is rarely an emotional space where needs are instantly gratified. To know love we have to invest time and commitment...'dreaming that love will save us, solve all our problems or provide a steady state of bliss or security only keeps us stuck in wishful fantasy, undermining the real power of the love -- which is to transform us.' Many people want love to function like a drug, giving them an immediate and sustained high. They want to do nothing, just passively receive the good feeling.
and he suddenly knew that if she killed herself, he would die. Maybe not immediately, maybe not with the same blinding rush of pain, but it would happen. You couldn't live for very long without a heart.
Childhood, n. The period of human life intermediate between the idiocy of infancy and the folly of youth - two removes from the sin of manhood and three from the remorse of age.