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1 " The problem with romance is the occlusion. The tunnel vision, drawing your every gaze downstream, into those other eyes, the flotsam of your better self, your clearer self, along for the ride. It doesn't matter what secrets swirl and bob in the waters beneath you, as you float toward that lady at Delphi, who, you imagined, reading Mythology, must have been beautiful. It doesn't matter that Charybdis, with no body, with no form, with only a mouth-as-being, couldn't have been evil, because she lacked the brain for it. It doesn't matter that following the logical course of events, the natural course, always disadvantages someone else, because love, after all, is simply a competition for resources, made infinitely complex and unknowable when squared and cubed and raised to every other emotional exponent - and then layered with sex and society and a bad memory for what those resources were in the first place. "
2 " Moderation is based on the idea that things do not fit neatly together. Politics is likely to be a competition between legitimate opposing interests. Philosophy is likely to be a tension between competing half truths. A personality is likely to be a battleground of valuable but incompatible traits. "
3 " Life is not a competition between men and woman. It is a collaboration. "
― David Alejandro Fearnhead
4 " Life is not a competition between men and women, it is a collaboration. "
5 " This [sand-dollar hunting] had become one of our rituals together, and though she would search for other varieties of shells when I was out of town or unable to see her, she would wait until I appeared on her front porch before setting off to extract these mute delicate coins from their settings in the sand. At first, we had collected only the larger specimens, but gradually as we learned what was rare and to be truly prized, we began to gather only the smallest sand dollars for our collection. Our trophies were sometimes as small as thumbnails and as fragile as contact lenses. Annie Kate collected the tiniest relics, round and cruciform and white as bone china when dried of sea water, and placed them in a glass-and-copper cricket box in her bedroom. Often we would sit together and admire the modest splendor of our accumulation. At times it looked like the coinage of a shy, diminutive species of angel. Our quest to find the smallest sand dollar became a competition between us, and as the months passed and Annie Kate grew larger with the child, the brittle, desiccated animals we unearthed from the sand became smaller and smaller. It was all a matter of training the eye to expect less. "
― Pat Conroy , The Lords of Discipline
6 " Dialogue isn’t a competition to be the smartest or the most correct person in the room "
7 " Herbenick invited me to sit in on the Human Sexuality class she was about to teach, one of the most popular courses on Indiana’s campus. She was, on that day, delivering a lecture on gender disparities in sexual satisfaction. More than one hundred fifty students were already seated in the classroom when we arrived, nearly all of them female, most dressed in sweats, their hair pulled into haphazard ponytails. They listened raptly as Herbenick explained the vastly different language young men and young women use when describing “good sex.” “Men are more likely to talk about pleasure, about orgasm,” Herbenick said. “Women talk more about absence of pain. Thirty percent of female college students say they experience pain during their sexual encounters as opposed to five percent of men.” The rates of pain among women, she added, shoot up to 70 percent when anal sex is included. Until recently, anal sex was a relatively rare practice among young adults. But as it’s become disproportionately common in porn—and the big payoff in R-rated fare such as Kingsman and The To Do List—it’s also on the rise in real life. In 1992 only 16 percent of women aged eighteen to twenty-four said they had tried anal sex. Today 20 percent of women eighteen to nineteen have, and by ages twenty to twenty-four it’s up to 40 percent. A 2014 study of heterosexuals sixteen to eighteen years old—and can we pause for a moment to consider just how young that is?—found that it was mainly boys who pushed for “fifth base,” approaching it less as a form of intimacy with a partner (who they assumed would both need to be and could be coerced into it) than a competition with other boys. Girls were expected to endure the act, which they consistently reported as painful. Both sexes blamed that discomfort on the girls themselves, for being “naïve or flawed,” unable to “relax.” Deborah Tolman has bluntly called anal “the new oral.” “Since all girls are now presumed to have oral sex in their repertoire,” she said, “anal sex is becoming the new ‘Will she do it or not?’ behavior, the new ‘Prove you love me.’” And still, she added, “girls’ sexual pleasure is not part of the equation.” According to Herbenick, the rise of anal sex places new pressures on young women to perform or else be labeled a prude. “It’s a metaphor, a symbol in one concrete behavior for the lack of education about sex, the normalization of female pain, and the way what had once been stigmatized has, over the course of a decade, become expected. If you don’t want to do it you’re suddenly not good enough, you’re frigid, you’re missing out, you’re not exploring your sexuality, you’re not adventurous. "
― Peggy Orenstein , Girls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape
8 " I’m not advocating a competition for who has it toughest. The caste systems of sex and race are interdependent and can only be uprooted together. It’s time to take equal pride in breaking all the barriers. "
― Gloria Steinem
9 " Don’t ever compliment me by insulting other women. That’s not a compliment, it’s a competition none of us agreed to. "
10 " Those who think life is a competition become corrupt. "
11 " If you accept life as a competition you will never be completely happy but if you accept life as a journey you will always be happy "
12 " Karna gave a mirthless smile and replied evenly,'What is the use of a competition if one cannot be compared with others? Talk is the weapon of the weak; release your arrows instead of hollow words. "
― Kavita Kané , Karna's Wife: The Outcast's Queen
13 " I liked learning but the challenge was that my mother's need to turn education into a competition was ruining the experience for me. "
― S.A. Tawks , Misadventurous
14 " Living one's life as if it is a competition between oneself and others, is an inevitable path to a stressful life. "
15 " Life is not a competition between you and others; rather, it's a journey to continuously make the very best out of your true abilities in life. "
16 " The journey of life is not a competition between you and others; rather, it is a quest to fulfill your true positive purpose on earth. "
17 " Writing is a competition between the writer and the page. When the page wins, you fail as a writer. "
― Bangambiki Habyarimana , The Great Pearl of Wisdom
18 " Life is not a competition with others. Life is a competition with yourself—to do your personal best each day. "
― Cameron C. Taylor , 8 Attributes of Great Achievers
19 " If you learn to develop an abundant mentality you will not be envious of others, you will celebrate their successes, you share in their joys and pains; don't see life as a competition but a complimentary. "
― Bernard Kelvin Clive
20 " When all the public eye sees are headscarves instead of individual stories, our community is collectively tokenized. It creates the perception that opportunity is limited and only a rare few of us can make it. Whenever that happens to an already marginalized community, it pits its own members in a competition against one another instead of against the restrictive frameworks that put us in that position in the first place. The first hijabi whatever won't eliminate Islamophobia just as the first black president hasn't eliminated racism, though both are signifiers of some type of progress — symbols of ascending beyond adversity. "
― , Muslim Girl: A Coming of Age Story