the stages QUOTES

1 " Hope,... which whispered from Pandora's box after all the other plagues and sorrows had escaped, is the best and last of all things. Without it, there is only time. And time pushes at our backs like a centrifuge, forcing outward and away, until it nudges us into oblivion... It's a law of motion, a fact of physics..., no different from the stages of white dwarves and red giants. Like all things in the universe, we are destined from birth to diverge. Time is simply the yardstick of our separation. If we are particles in a sea of distance, exploded from an original whole, then there is a science to our solitude. We are lonely in proportion to our years. "

― Ian Caldwell , The Rule of Four

2 " According to scientists, there are three stages of love: lust, attraction, and attachment. And, it turns out, each of the stages is orchestrated by chemicals—neurotransmitters—in the brain.

As you might expect, lust is ruled by testosterone and estrogen.

The second stage, attraction, is governed by dopamine and serotonin. When, for example, couples report feeling indescribably happy in each other’s presence, that’s dopamine, the pleasure hormone, doing its work.

Taking cocaine fosters the same level of euphoria. In fact, scientists who study both the brains of new lovers and cocaine addicts are hard-pressed to tell the difference.

The second chemical of the attraction phase is serotonin. When couples confess that they can’t stop thinking about each other, it’s because their serotonin level has dropped. People in love have the same low serotonin levels as people with OCD. The reason they can’t stop thinking about each other is that they are literally obsessed.

Oxytocin and vasopressin control the third stage: attachment or long-term bonding. Oxytocin is released during orgasm and makes you feel closer to the person you’ve had sex with. It’s also released during childbirth and helps bond mother to child. Vasopressin is released postcoitally.

Natasha knows these facts cold. Knowing them helped her get over Rob’s betrayal. So she knows: love is just chemicals and coincidence.

So why does Daniel feel like something more? "

― Nicola Yoon , The Sun Is Also a Star

3 " It's puzzling to me that so many self-help gurus urge people to visualize victory, and stop there. Some even insist that if you wish for good things long enough and hard enough, you'll get them - and, conversely, that if you focus on the negative, you actually invite bad things to happen. Why make yourself miserable worrying? Why waste time getting ready for disasters that may never happen? Anticipating problems and figuring out how to solve them is actually the opposite of worrying: it's productive. Likewise, coming up with a plan of action isn't a waste of time if it gives you peace of mind. While it's true that you may wind up getting ready for something that never happens, if the stages are at all high, it's worth it. "

― Chris Hadfield , An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth

4 " When I look over my past, I see that the stages in my life are like the phases of the moon. I've had periods where I was the waxing gibbous: fat with wealth and success. There have been other seasons when my happiness was like the waning crescent and I watched my joy fade away slowly, merging with the atmosphere around me as if it never existed. Then I felt as if I was left with nothing more than an illusion, but happiness returns in time and glows once more in corpulent fullness. It's time that makes the difference. "

― Amy Neftzger , Conversations with the Moon

5 " In the past you have suppressed and denied the ego system. The ego has not been raised to awareness, but once you start to raise it to awareness and the stuff starts getting flushed up, there is a strong tendency to want to project. Even though the ego is now being unveiled, you are seeing that the mind is still very strongly invested in it and that is where the guilt comes in. The transcendence will eventually come where we are able to detach in our mind from those false thoughts, from the attack thoughts; we will be able to just calmly see the false as false. But that is one of the stages that we go through. Once it starts to get flushed up there is a real tendency to project – to be what Jesus calls the unhealed healer. You want to go around and give healing without having healed yourselves and it is just to watch as we do this, and go through it. "

― David Hoffmeister , Unwind Your Mind Back to God: Experiencing A Course in Miracles

6 " Someone experiencing the stages of grief is rarely aware of how his behavior might appear to others. Grief often produces a “zoom lens effect,” in which the focus is entirely on oneself, to the exclusion of external considerations. "

― Sol Luckman , Snooze: A Story of Awakening

7 " The healing process is best described as a spiral. Survivors go through the stages once, sometimes many times; sometimes in one order, sometimes in another. Each time they hit a stage again, they move up the spiral: they can integrate new information and a broader range of feelings, utilize more resources, take better care of themselves, and make deeper changes.” Allies in Healing by Laura Davis "

― Laura Davis , Allies in Healing: When the Person You Love Is a Survivor of Child Sexual Abuse

8 " We can witness collective movements alarmingly influenced by genuine social phobias and affecting the most industrialized and educated societies. Exclusive identities are being asserted, singular affiliations are being stressed, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to recognize the other in the mirror of one´s own quest. Reducing the other to the sole expression of his or her " difference" is one of the stages of dehumanization; and law alone - let alone the right to equality - cannot suffice to remedy the situation. Here comes the time of the new " barbarians" . "

9 " Remember: knowing originates on the inside, knowledge on the outside. Certain facts and concepts may change, come into being, disappear, or be replaced, but what it is to be a human being will never really be all that different. Every person to ever live, now and the whole of history, has had a rich and elaborate world of inner experience, but it has mainly been flesh upon the same skeleton. We are all
born, come to terms with the world, and then come to terms with coming to terms with the world, as we go through the stages of puberty, old age, death and
making sense of it all in between. We all live the same process in different ways. Some live it longer than others and some cover more ground. But that's it. "

― Oli Anderson , Personal Revolutions: A Short Course in Realness

10 " If it has been revealed to man that the Almighty made him out of the dust of the earth, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, it is in vain to tell a Christian that man was originally a speck of albumen, and passed through the stages of monads and monkeys, before he attained his present intellectual preeminence. If it be a received truth that the Creator has repeatedly interposed in the government of the universe and displayed his immediate agency in miraculous interpositions, it is an insult to any reader to tell him that the being slumbers on his throne and rules under a " primal arrangement in his counsels," and " by a code of laws of unbending operation. "

11 " I'd cycled through the stages of rejection - denial, anger, homicidal mania, hating Matt's stupid face, and acceptance "

― , Sweet Tooth: A Memoir

12 " Her remark laid bare not only the reality - not enough comic opportunities for women in Hollywood - but also the ideology that created and perpetuated that reality. It was right there in the sentence structure, easily parsed: 'All the scripts are for men and you play 'the girl'' suggests that the scripts were handed down by the clean, white hand of God. It banished 'the girl' to the sidelines to perform her girly insignificance on command. It was right there in the dismissive way her comment was received as clickbait all over the Internet. 'Borat's Babe Plans a Hollywood Sex Revolution,' one headline announced, not only missing the point but mocking and dismissing it. Women's experience in its entirety seemed contained in that remark, not to mention several of the stages of feminist grief: the shock of waking up to the fact that the world does not also belong to you; the shame at having been so naive as to have thought it did; the indignation, depression, and despair that follow this realization; and, finally, the marshaling of the handy coping mechanisms, compartmentalization, pragmatism, and diminished expectations. "

― Carina Chocano , You Play the Girl: And Other Vexing Stories That Tell Women Who They Are

13 " If you want to surpass the stages of doubt and secure better communication between your inner and outer body it is wise to surpass the challenge of the words ‘if only’. "

― Stephen Richards , Be First: Achieve Every Dream

14 " From my earliest youth, I have known that while one is obliged to plan with care the stages of one's journey, one is entitled to dream, and keep dreaming, of its destination. A man may feel as old as his years yet as young as his dreams. "

15 " All along we find that social life - religion, politics, art - reflects the stages reached in the development of the knowledge of self; it shows the social uses made of this knowledge. "