#ode

...if you do not even understand what words say, how can you expect to pass judgement on what words conceal? ↗

— H.D.

#doolittle #h-d #hilda #modernism #poetry

Sam picks the stone up and clenches his entire body in deep concentration. Nothing happens. " Oh come on," he says to the stone. " I promise to use it for the power of good. No girls' locker rooms, I swear. ↗

— Pittacus Lore

#sam

The overwhelming noise we live with has made a fundamental pleasure like sex somehow less exciting, less satisfying, than it was for our libidinous forefathers and mothers. It seems to me that for sex and other pleasures to be enjoyed to the fullest, a certain contemplative quality to life must be present. If you doubt this imagine yourself for a moment having sex. Now imagine you wished to increase the pleasure you were feeling, feel it more intensely. What might you do? Well one of the things you'd probably do is close your eyes. What this does of course is shut out other stimuli. The visual quiet increases your sensual enjoyment and you concentrate more fully on the pleasure. The same is true for the removal of auditory noise as well. Well my feeling is that the average person has a much harder time doing this today than they would have decades ago. Today you close your eyes and shut off Television but the noise persists. It's part of our fabric now, our biology, and all other pleasures including sex are diminished as a result. We don't notice this derogation by the way and sex still feels great, don't get me wrong, but I think the difference is there nonetheless. Like the difference between seeing breasts when you're thirty as opposed to when you were thirteen. ↗

— Sergio De La Pava

#modernity #noise #pleasure #saturation #sex

Even though we don't admit it, every single one of us aspires to be like somebody, whether they live in the world today, within the bard's lyrics, or on the pages in the Library ↗

— Evan Meekins

#fantasy #fantasy-fiction #fiction #heroes #role-models

In essence I find that the foundation of modern conservatism is driven by a clinging to God in fear of the world, whereas the foundation of modern liberalism is a clinging to the world in fear of God; albeit, the true foundation should be one's clinging to God in fear of God. ↗

— Criss Jami

#belief #clinging #conservatism #conservative #essence

She'd lost two more pounds. A picture of the models she'd cut out of the magazine flashed through Kessa's mind. And the winner is... seventy-three! ↗

— Steven Levenkron

#eating-disorder #models #weight #eating-disorders

From the newsstands a dozen models smiled up at her from a dozen magazine covers, smiled in thin-faced, high-cheekboned agreement to Kessa's new discovery. They knew the secret too. They knew thin was good, thin was strong; thin was safe. ↗

— Steven Levenkron

#eating-disorders #happy #models #skinny #society

As a parent, I have a job as a role model to my children, and by extension, to other young people. ↗

— Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

#extension #i #job #model #other

I think when you're 10 years old, it's too much to see something with the threat of death in every episode. Kids are better left naive about certain things. ↗

— J. J. Abrams

#better #certain #death #episode #every

We worked on solving the problem of voice communications in a noisy military environment. We established military codes that are highly audible and invented selection tests for personnel who had a superior ability to recognize sound in a noisy background. ↗

— M. H. Abrams

#audible #background #codes #communications #environment