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1 " WE MAY FEEL...BUT WE DON'TWe may feel the need to change employment, but we don’t.We may feel the need to start a specific project, but we don’t.We may feel the need to pursue higher education, but we don’tWe may feel the need to heal a broken relationship, but we don’t.We may feel the need to work to improve our spiritual lives, but we don’t.We may feel the need to take steps toward a healthier physical or emotional life for ourselves and/or our family, but again, we don’t.(This list could likely go on for eternity.)The desire for progression is innate, but the problem we face is that the actual act of progression is also a choice.Without embracing our inherent need for progress, for positive growth and/or change, we’ll still go on living....But at what cost? "
― Richie Norton
2 " In conscious life, we achieve some sense of ourselves as reasonably unified, coherent selves, and without this action would be impossible. But all this is merely at the ‘imaginary’ level of the ego, which is no more than the tip of the iceberg of the human subject known to psychoanalysis. The ego is function or effect of a subject which is always dispersed, never identical with itself, strung out along the chains of the discourses which constitute it. There is a radical split between these two levels of being — a gap most dramatically exemplified by the act of referring to myself in a sentence. When I say ‘Tomorrow I will mow the lawn,’ the ‘I’ which I pronounce is an immediately intelligible, fairly stable point of reference which belies the murky depths of the ‘I’ which does the pronouncing. The former ‘I’ is known to linguistic theory as the ‘subject of the enunciation’, the topic designated by my sentence; the latter ‘I’, the one who speaks the sentence, is the ‘subject of the enunciating’, the subject of the actual act of speaking. In the process of speaking and writing, these two ‘I’s’ seem to achieve a rough sort of unity; but this unity is of an imaginary kind. The ‘subject of the enunciating’, the actual speaking, writing human person, can never represent himself or herself fully in what is said: there is no sign which will, so to speak, sum up my entire being. I can only designate myself in language by a convenient pronoun. The pronoun ‘I’ stands in for the ever-elusive subject, which will always slip through the nets of any particular piece of language; and this is equivalent to saying that I cannot ‘mean’ and ‘be’ simultaneously. To make this point, Lacan boldly rewrites Descartes’s ‘I think, therefore I am’ as: ‘I am not where I think, and I think where I am not. "
― Terry Eagleton , Literary Theory: An Introduction
3 " See, sexuality is less about the actual act of having pretty good sex for seventeen minutes twice a week and much more about surrounding yourself with an ever simmering sensual energy, pulsing just underneath your daily life and infusing almost everything you do. It's like you're always just a little bit horny, just a little turned on, but the object of your gentle lust isn't just your lover, it's divine life itself. "
― Sera J. Beak , The Red Book: A Deliciously Unorthodox Approach to Igniting Your Divine Spark
4 " But while the thought of being dead seemed appealing, the actual act of dying did not. "
― Leslye Walton , The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender
5 " Because as any writer will tell you, an IDEA for a book is like falling in love, it’s all wild emotion and headlong rush, but the ACTUAL ACT of writing a book is like building a relationship: it is joyous, slow, fragile, frustrating, exhilarating, painstaking, exhausting, worth it. "
― Ben H. Winters , The Last Policeman (The Last Policeman, #1)