#rue

But her greatest assets were her bound feet, called in Chinese "three-inch golden lilies" (san-tsun-gin-lian). This meant she walked "like a tender young willow shoot in a spring breeze," as Chinese connoisseurs of women traditionally put it. The sight of a woman teetering on bound feet was supposed to have an erotic effect on men, partly because her vulnerability induced a feeling of protectiveness in the onlooker. ↗

— Jung Chang

#feet #sad-but-true #change

There is nothing more beautiful than someone who goes out of their way to make life beautiful for others. ↗

— Mandy Hale

#beauty #helping-hand #helping-others #helping-people #inner-beauty

It was the first time! Just because there weren’t fireworks the first time doesn’t mean there will never be fireworks. We’re human; we’re adults; we teach each other; we communicate; fireworks don’t just go off, wham-bang; fireworks evolve!’ Awestruck by the utter, asinine nonsense of this metaphor, everyone is still. Into the stillness, the ample woman drops the word ‘Wrong.’ Then she says it again. ‘Wrong…I’m talking about science…Pheromones.’ The woman turns to Cornelia. ‘The chemicals in his body call out. The chemicals in your body answer. It either happens or it doesn’t.’ On top of being dumb, Cornelia is dumbfounded. ↗

— Marisa de los Santos

#fireworks #love #true-love #communication

Love, like Fortune, favours the bold. ↗

— E.A. Bucchianeri

#courage #courage-in-love #falling-in-love #first-love #fortune

Last year I built a Courage Machine, but I thought it might be noisy and was too afraid to turn it on. So I coated it with glue, covered it with cat hair, mounted it on my wall, and started claiming it was an exotic animal I killed on a Safari in Africa. I'd like to believe people believe me, on account of it being so strange that it has to be true. ↗

— Jarod Kintz

#africa #cat-hair #courage #exotic-animal #fear

Oh, my god, he thought, realizing why he had always felt negatively towards Eden. She reminds me of my mother. The thought made his throat close up tight. He mused about the day's events. What a ride. Edward had surprised him. The man had courage, committing to love. What had he said to that starlet, none of it meant anything? ↗

— H. Raven Rose

#caffeine #commitment #courage #homoerotica #love

Prijateljstvo se ne bira, rekao je, ono biva, ko zna zbog čega, kao ljubav. A ništa ja nisam tebi poklonio, već sebi. ↗

— Meša Selimović

#true-friends #death

But the examinations are the chief bugbears of my college life. Although I have faced them many times and cast them down and made them bite the dust, yet they rise again and menace me with pale looks, until like Bob Acres I feel my courage oozing out at my finger ends. The days before these ordeals take place are spent in cramming your mind with mystic formula and indigestible dates—unpalatable diets, until you wish that books and science and you were buried in the depths of the sea. At last the dreaded hour arrives, and you are a favoured being indeed if you feel prepared, and are able at the right time to call to your standard thoughts that will aid you in that supreme effort. It happens too often that your trumpet call is unheeded. It is most perplexing and exasperating that just at the moment when you need your memory and a nice sense of discrimination, these faculties take to themselves wings and fly away. The facts you have garnered with such infinite trouble invariably fail you at a pinch. ↗

— Helen Keller

#courage

We have better relationships with those who truly seek us rather than those sitting on the couch watching us move mountains trying to prove ourselves. ↗

— Criss Jami

#courtship #dating #friend #friends #friendship

Love shouldn’t require Windex to be clear. It either is or it isn’t. ↗

— Mandy Hale

#clarity #dating #finding-the-one #he-s-just-not-that-into-you #holding-out-for-the-best