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" She imagined him leaning against the shuttle, entertaining thoughts of scolding her for dressing like a ragged commoner. Never mind that her present outfit was light years ahead in comfort.
(Actually, he’s wishing he had been less critical of you earlier. He feels bad that you won’t acknowledge his presence, and he blames himself.)
(Quit it, Ian. I’m not going to feel sorry for him.)
She caught her protector’s shrewd grin, highlighted by the fire’s glow. (You already do, Queenie.)
(This talent of yours is really annoying.)
He leaned close to her ear and whispered, “That’s not what you thought earlier when you wanted to get ahold of Efren.”
“One tiny rosebud in a handful of thorns,” she retorted. "
― Richelle E. Goodrich , Eena, The Curse of Wanyaka Cave (The Harrowbethian Saga #3)
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" Imagination is absolutely critical to the quality of our lives. Our imagination enables us to leave our routine everyday existence by fantasizing about travel, food, sex, falling in love, or having the last word—all the things that make life interesting. Imagination gives us the opportunity to envision new possibilities—it is an essential launchpad for making our hopes come true. It fires our creativity, relieves our boredom, alleviates our pain, enhances our pleasure, and enriches our most intimate relationships. "
― Bessel van der Kolk , The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma
127
" When Carl asked the Brices to bring their whole family to therapy, everyone in the family knew intuitively what that meant. Their whole world would be exposed: all its caring, its history, its anger, its anxiety. All in one place at once time, subject to the scrutiny and invasion of a stranger. And that was too much vulnerability. With its own unconscious wisdom, the family elected Don to stay home and test the therapists. Did we really mean everybody? Would we weaken and capitulate if they didn't bring Don?
They had something to gain by the strategy. If we were hesitant and unconfident in our approach to their defiance, they would know that they could not trust us with the boiling cauldron of feeling which their family contained. If we were decisive and firm, they would guess that maybe we could handle the stresses which they intuitively knew had to be brought out into the open. One way or another, they had to find out how much power we had. In the meantime, they postponed facing that mysterious electricity, that critical mass, the whole family. Perhaps they thought they could be spared what Zorba called the full catastrophe. "
― , The Family Crucible: The Intense Experience of Family Therapy
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" Not all minds can hold science so easily. Most of what you can find inside various minds have no or weak connection with science; they are only values. If your mind takes any idea for guaranteed before its empirical investigation, or if you cannot criticize or make any assumption that your hypothesis related to it can be false, as well as true, it means you don’t do science, your mind rather shares some ideological, historical, religious or ethical values. No politics, ethics, history, religion, etc. is a science in strict sense of term. All of them engage in manipulation of brains in different ways. That is why any strong political, ethical, historical, religious bias would make your so-called ‘scientific mind’ weak. Although it is true that not all questions can be answered using scientific approaches, the formation of values inside your mind should substantially be up to you — your critical thinking and doubting intuition. "
― Elmar Hussein
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" As always when he worked with this much concentration he began to feel a sense of introverting pressure. There was no way out once he was in, no genuine rest, no one to talk to who was capable of understanding the complexity (simplicity) of the problem or the approaches to a tentative solution. There came a time in every prolonged effort when he had a moment of near panic, or " terror in a lonely place," the original semantic content of the word. The lonely place was his own mind. As a mathematician he was free from subjection to reality, free to impose his ideas and designs on his own test environment. The only valid standard for his work, its critical point (zero or infinity), was the beauty it possessed, the deft strength of his mathematical reasoning. THe work's ultimate value was simply what it revealed about the nature of his intellect. What was at stake, in effect, was his own principle of intelligence or individual consciousness; his identity, in short. This was the infalling trap, the source of art's private involvement with obsession and despair, neither more nor less than the artist's self-containment, a mental state that led to storms of overwork and extended stretches of depression, that brought on indifference to life and at times the need to regurgitate it, to seek the level of expelled matter. Of course, the sense at the end of a serious effort, if the end is reached successfully, is one of lyrical exhilaration. There is air to breathe and a place to stand. The work gradually reveals its attachment to the charged particles of other minds, men now historical, the rediscovered dead; to the main structure of mathematical thought; perhaps even to reality itself, the so-called sum of things. It is possible to stand in time's pinewood dust and admire one's own veronicas and pavanes. "