#ode

Jenny couldn't believe herself a multiple. She was a mother, a nurse, not that screwball who appeared on the screen like some dysfunctional figment of her imagination trying to find a life. Still, she was coming to a realization that accepting who she was would be the jailer's key to liberate her from this cuckoo's nest. ↗

— Judy Byington

#dissociative-identity-diroder #mpd #multiplicity #multipple-personality-disorder #trauma-experiences

Miss Millick wondered just what had happened to Mr. Wran. He kept making the strangest remarks when she took dictation. Just this morning he had quickly turned around and asked, "Have you ever seen a ghost, Miss Millick?" And she had tittered nervously and replied, "When I was a girl there was a thing in white that used to come out of the closet in the attic bedroom when you slept there, and moan. Of course it was just my imagination. I was frightened of lots of things." And he had said, "I don't mean that traditional kind of ghost. I mean a ghost from the world today, with the soot of the factories in its face and the pounding of machinery in its soul. The kind that would haunt coal yards and slip around at night through deserted office buildings like this one. A real ghost. Not something out of books." And she hadn't known what to say. ("Smoke Ghost") ↗

— Fritz Leiber

#ghosts #horror #industry #modernity #imagination

Like the Hindu in Belfast who was asked whether he was a Catholic Hindu or a Protestant Hindu, those of us who follow this fresh reading of the New Testament want to say to our critics right and left, ‘Don’t imagine that because we don’t check all your fundamentalist boxes, we must be modernists, or that because we don’t check all your modernist boxes, we must be fundamentalists. ↗

— N.T. Wright

#modernists #new-testament #sbl #imagination

I think some of the best modern writing comes now from travellers. ↗

— Michael Palin

#comes #i #i think #modern #now

When a young person, even a gifted one, grows up without proximate living examples of what she may aspire to become--whether lawyer, scientist, artist, or leader in any realm--her goal remains abstract. Such models as appear in books or on the news, however inspiring or revered, are ultimately too remote to be real, let alone influential. But a role model in the flesh provides more than inspiration; his or her very existence is confirmation of possibilities one may have every reason to doubt, saying, 'Yes, someone like me can do this. ↗

— Sonia Sotomayor

#mentoring #occupations #role-models #success #inspirational

Forget Batman: when I really thought about what I wanted to be when I grew up, I wanted to be my dad. ↗

— Paul Asay

#fatherhood #inspiration #parenthood #rolemodeling #inspirational

My mother once told me, when you have to make a decision, imagine the person you want to become someday. Ask yourself, what would that person do? ↗

— Barry Deutsch

#inspirational #mothers #role-models #imagination

Going back into the history of a word, very often into Latin, we come back pretty commonly to pictures or models of how things happen or are done. ↗

— J. L. Austin

#come #commonly #done #going #happen

Lovemaking is more than sex, it's a connecting of hearts, meeting of minds, & touching of souls." ~ Dr. Scott Hensley ↗

— Pamela S. Thibodeaux

#contemporary-christian-fiction #contemporary-western-romance #cowboy-romance #inspirational-with-an-edge #pamela-s-thibodeaux

I have met some highly intelligent believers, but history has no record to say that [s]he knew or understood the mind of god. Yet this is precisely the qualification which the godly must claim—so modestly and so humbly—to possess. It is time to withdraw our 'respect' from such fantastic claims, all of them aimed at the exertion of power over other humans in the real and material world. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#atheism #belief #fantasy #god #humility