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Read through the most famous quotes by topic #nat
The elk that you glimpse in the summer, those at the forest edge, are survivors of winter, only the strongest. You see one just before dusk that summer, standing at the perimeter of the meadow so it can step back to the forest and vanish. You can't help imagining the still, frozen nights behind it, so cold that the slightest motion is monumental. I have found their bodies, half drifted over in snow, no sign of animal attack or injury. Just toppled over one night with ice working into their lungs. You wouldn't want to stand outside for more than a few minutes in that kind of weather. If you lived through only one of those winters the way this elk has, you would write books about it. You would become a shaman. You would be forever changed. That elk from the winter stands there on the summer evening, watching from beside the forest. It keeps its story to itself. ↗
At that time a psychologist appeared in Oslo, and wrote interesting articles in the paper about how to cure homosexuality. … This man is a pervert. He wants to change nature. He wants to change the natural growth of love between a woman and a woman, or between a man and a man. If society itself wasn't hostile to love, he would never have been allowed to do that. Can't you see? Why can't you ever get it out of your head that love is against nature? Because that's what you're saying when you say homosexuality is against nature. Didn't nature make me? Or was I the result of some mysterious embryonic experiment, conceived on another planet, and planted in my mother's womb? Because I can assure you: I was born a lesbian. I was a lesbian the moment I came out and said, Boooooo. ↗
Our destination isn't clear. All I know is that I want to get there together. The Unknown is scary. I'll always have some fear about what's going to happen next. The thing is, the unknown can also be exciting. Your life could change in an instant anytime. But sometimes, that change is the best thing that will ever happen to you. Maybe I dont' have to know what my fate is to know that everything will be okay. Maybe the not knowing is how we move forward. Wherever I'm headed, I know it's exactly where I'm supposed to be. ↗
There is history the way Tolstoy imagined it, as a great, slow-moving weather system in which even tsars and generals are just leaves before the storm. And there is history the way Hollywood imagines it, as a single story line in which the right move by the tsar or the wrong move by the general changes everything. Most of us, deep down, are probably Hollywood people. We like to invent “what if” scenarios--what if x had never happened, what if y had happened instead?--because we like to believe that individual decisions make a difference: that, if not for x, or if only there had been y, history might have plunged forever down a completely different path. Since we are agents, we have an interest in the efficacy of agency. ↗
Much like Ella, I'd found myself with an excess of words, the wealth of which far exceeded the pathetic limits of my own biography. I'd needed narrative space to to extend myself into; I'd needed more lives. I, too, had needed another set of parents, and someone other than myself to throw my metaphysical tantrums. I'd cooked up those avatars in the soup of my ever-changing self, but they were not me--they did what I wouldn't, or couldn't, do. Listening to Ella furiously and endlessly unfurl the Mingus tales, I understood that the need to tell stories was deeply embedded in our minds and inseparably entangled with the mechanisms that generate and absorb language. Narrative imagination--and therefore fiction--was a basic evolutionary tool of survival. We processed the world by telling stories, produced human knowledge through our engagement with imagined selves. ↗
Depression is partly a nocebo effect, in the sense that it can be produced by negative exceptions about oneself and the world. The way in which these negative expectations develop and produce their negative effects provides some clues as to how they can be reversed. Expectancy effects grow, feeding upon themselves. One reason this happens is that our subjective states - our feelings, our moods and sensations - are in constant flux, changing from day to day and from moment to moment. The effects of these fluctuations depend on how we interpret them, and our interpretations depend on our beliefs and expectations. When we expect to feel worse, we tend to notice random small negative changes and interpret them as evidence that we are in fact getting worse. This interpretation makes us actually feel worse, and it strengthens the belief that we are getting worse, leading to a vicious cycle in which our expectations and negative emotions feed on each other, cascading into a full-blown depressive episode. .. Positive expectancies have the opposite effect. They can set in motion a begin cycle, in which random fluctuations in mood and well being are interpreted as evidence of treatment effectiveness, thereby instilling a further sense of hope and countering the feeling of hopelessness that are so central to clinical depression. ↗
Space, like time, engenders forgetfulness; but it does so by setting us bodily free from our surroundings and giving us back our primitive, unattached state ... Time, we say, is Lethe; but change of air is a similar draught, and, if it works less thoroughly, does so more quickly. ↗
H--‐how did we get in the water?” “You were burning. I needed to do something to cool you. As soon as I carried you in, though, you started flailing around. Scared me,” he added on a whisper. That explained the dream. But it didn’t change what she knew was coming. She pressed her face against his neck and drew in the sweet scent of his skin. Loved the rasp of his stubbly cheek against her flesh. “Why do I get the feeling you’re holding something back?” he asked softly. Because he was smart. And because even in the short amount of time they’d been together, he’d learned more about her than anyone else in her entire life. “I believe in signs. I never did before but…I dreamed about you.” “You did?” She nodded. “I think I have for a while, I just…I didn’t know it was you. But now…” She swallowed hard. “I should have waited for you. It’s the biggest regret I have. I’m sorry I didn’t wait. ↗
I believe that the great stretches of forests in northern Europe, with their constant seasonal changes, their restricted views, their astonish biological diversity, their secret gifts and perils and the knowledge that you have to go through them to get anywhere else, created the themes and ethics of the fairy tales we know best. There are secrets, hidden identities, cunning disguises; there are rhythms of change like the changes of the seasons; there are characters, both human and animal, whose assistance can be earned or spurned; and there is -- over and over again -- the journey or quest, which leads first to knowledge and then to happiness. The forest is the place of trial in fairy stories, both dangerous and exciting. Coming to terms with the forest, surviving its terrors, utilising its gifts and gaining its help is the way to 'happy ever after. ↗
