3
" This was very exciting. I'd never had two boys get into a fight over me before. The fact that one of the boys was my stepbrother, however, and held about as much romantic appeal for me as Max, the family dog, somewhat dampened my enthusiasm. And Michael wasn't much of a catch, either, when you actually thought about it, being a potential murderer and all. Oh, why did I have to have such a couple of losers fighting over me? Why couldn't Matt Damon and Ben Affleck fight over me? Now that would be truly excellent. "
― , Reunion (The Mediator, #3)
5
" I want you cool and regal, earthy and impertinent, spoiling for a fight and abashed at your own temper. I want you flushed with exertion and rosy with sleep. I want you teasing and provocative, somber and thoughtful. I want every emotion, every mood, every year in a lifetime to come. I want you beside me, to encourage and argue with me, to help me and let me help you. I want to be your champion and lover, your mentor and student. "
― Connie Brockway , The Bridal Season (Bridal Stories, #1)
8
" Imagine yourself having a fight with your romantic partner. The tension of the situation makes your limbic system run at full throttle and you become flooded with stress hormones like cortisol and adrenalin. The high levels of these chemicals suddenly make you so damn angry, that you burst out in front of your partner saying, “I wish you die, so that I can have some peace in my life”. Given the stress of the situation through highly active limbic system, your PFC loses its freedom to take the right decision and you burst out with foul language in front of your partner, that may ruin your relationship. In simple terms due to your mental instability, you lost your free will to make the right decision.
But when the conversation is over, and you relax for a while, your stress hormone levels come down to normal, and you regain your usual cheerful state of mind. Immediately, your PFC starts analyzing the explosive conversation you had with your partner. Healthy activity of the entire frontal lobes, especially the PFC suddenly overwhelms you with a feeling of guilt. Your brain makes you realize, that you have done something devilish. As a result, now you find yourself making the willful decision of apologizing to your partner and making up to him or her, no matter how much effort it takes, because your PFC comes up the solution that it is the healthiest thing to do for your personal life.
From this you can see, that what you call free will is something that is not consistent. It changes based on your mental health. Mental instability or illness, truly cripples your free will. And the healthier your frontal lobes are, the better you can take good decisions. And the most effective way to keep your frontal lobes healthy is to practice some kind of meditation. "
― Abhijit Naskar , What is Mind?
12
" When animals make a stupid mistake, you laugh at them. A cat misjudges a leap. A dog looks overly quizzical about a simple object. These are funny things. But when a person doesn’t understand something, if they miscalculate and hit the brakes too late, blame is assigned. They are stupid. They are wrong. Teachers and cops are there to sort it out, with a trail of paperwork to illustrate the stupidity. The faults. The evidence and incidents of these things. We have entire systems in place to help decide who is what. Sometimes the systems don’t work. Families spend their weekend afternoons at animal shelters, even when they’re not looking for a pet. They come to see the unwanted and unloved. The cats and dogs who don’t understand why they are these things. They are petted and combed, walked and fed, cooed over and kissed. Then they go back in their cages and sometimes tears are shed. Fuzzy faces peering through bars can be unbearable for many. Change the face to a human one and the reaction changes. The reason why is because people should know better. But our logic is skewed in this respect. A dog that bites is a dead dog. First day at the shelter and I already saw one put to sleep, which in itself is a misleading phrase. Sleep implies that you have the option of waking up. Once their bodies pass unconsciousness to something deeper where systems start to fail, they revolt a little bit, put up a fight on a molecular level. They kick. They cry. They don’t want to go. And this happens because their jaws closed over a human hand, ever so briefly. Maybe even just the once. But people, they get chances. They get the benefit of the doubt. Even though they have the higher logic functioning and they knew when they did it THEY KNEW it was a bad thing. "
― Mindy McGinnis , The Female of the Species
13
" Pitiful and pitied by no one, why have I come to the ignominy of this detestable old age, who was ruler of two kingdoms, mother of two kings? My guts are torn from me, my family is carried off and removed from me. The young king [crown prince Henry, †1183] and the count of Britanny [prince Geoffrey, †1186] sleep in dust, and their most unhappy mother is compelled to be irremediably tormented by the memory of the dead. Two sons remain to my solace, who today survive to punish me, miserable and condemned. King Richard [the Lionheart] is held in chains [in captivity with Emperor Henry VI of Germany]. His brother, John, depletes his kingdom with iron [the sword] and lays it waste with fire. In all things the Lord has turned cruel to me and attacked me with the harshness of his hand. Truly his wrath battles against me: my sons fight amongst themselves, if it is a fight where where one is restrained in chains, the other, adding sorrow to sorrow, undertakes to usurp the kingdom of the exile by cruel tyranny. Good Jesus, who will grant that you protect me in hell and hide me until your fury passes, until the arrows which are in me cease, by which my whole spirit is sucked "
15
" From birth to death and further on
As we were born and introduced into this world,
We had a gift hard to express by word
And somewhere in our continuous road,
It kind of lost it sense and turned.
There was that time we sure remember,
When everything was now and 'till forever
Children with no worries and no regrets,
The only goal was making a few friends.
But later on everything has changed,
By minds that had it all arranged
To bring the people into stress,
Into creating their own mess.
We have been slaved by our own mind,
Turned into something out of our kind
Slowly faded away from the present time,
Forced to believe in lies, in fights and crime.
They made it clearly a fight of the ego,
A never ending war that won't just go
They made it a competitive game,
To seek selfish materialistic fame.
They turned us one against eachother,
Man against man, brother against brother
Dividing us by religion and skin color,
Making us fight to death over a dollar.
Making us lose ourselves in sadly thoughts,
Wasting our days by living in the past
Depressed and haunted by the memories,
And yet still hoping to fly in our dreams.
Some of us tried learning how to dance,
Step after step, giving our soul a new chance
Some of us left our ego vanish into sounds,
Thus being aware of our natural bounce.
Some tried expressing in their rhymes,
The voice of a generation which never dies
They reached eternity through poetry
Leaving the teachings that shall fulfill the prophecy
Others have found their way through spirituality,
Becoming conscious of the human duality
Seeking the spiritual enlightenment,
Of escaping an ego-oriented fighting
Science, philosophy, religion,
Try to explain the human origin.
Maybe changes are yet to come,
And it shall be better for some
Death's for the spirit not an end,
But a relieving of the embodiment
So I believe that furthermore,
We'll understand the power of our soul
But leaving behind all we know,
And all that we might not yet know
It all resumes to that certain truth,
That we all seek to once conclude. "
― Virgil Kalyana Mittata Iordache
19
" Edgar, there's a difference between missing him and wanting nothing to change," she said. " They aren't the same things at all. And we can't do anything about either one. Things always change. Things would be changing right now if your father were alive, Edgar. That's just life. You can fight it or you accept it. The only difference is, if you accept it, you can get to do other things. If you fight it, you're stuck in the same spot forever. Does that make sense?" But aren't some changes worth fighting?" You know that's true." So how do you know which is which?" I don't know a way to tell for sure," she said. " You ask, 'Why am I really fighting this?' If the answer is 'Because I'm scared of what things will be like,' then, most times, you're fighting for the wrong reason." And if that's not the answer?" Then you dig in your heels and you fight and fight and fight. But you have to be absolutely sure you can handle a different kind of change, because in the end, things will change anyway, just not that way. In fact, if you get into a fight like that, it pretty much guarantees things are going to change. "
