Hope

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 175 of 216 · 20 per page

• From Best Erotica & Sexual Deviance Narratives Ever Written (2024)

  I had the most ardent desire to bring her to discharge her primary religious duties; but we would have been obliged to confide in a priest, and Rodin would not have one in the house; he beheld them, and the beliefs they professed, with horror: nothing in the world would have induced him to suffer one to come near his daughter; to lead the girl to a confessor was equally impossible: Rodin never allowed Rosalie to go abroad unless he accompanied her. We were therefore constrained to bide our time until some occasion might present itself; and while we waited I instructed the young person; by giving her a taste for virtue, I inspired in her another for Religion, I revealed to her its sacred dogmas and its sublime mysteries, and I so intimately attached these two sentiments to her youthful heart that I rendered them indispensable to her life's happiness. "O Mademoiselle," I said one day, my eyes welling with tears at her compunction, "can man blind himself to the point of believing that he is not destined to some better end? Is not the fact he has been endowed with the capacity of consciousness of his God sufficient evidence that this blessing has not been accorded him save to meet the responsibilities it imposes? Well, what may be the foundation of the veneration we owe the Eternal, if it is not that virtue of which He is the example? Can the Creator of so many wonders have other than good laws? And can our hearts be pleasing unto Him if their element is not good? It seems to me that, for sensitive spirits, the only valid motives for loving that Supreme Being must be those gratitude inspires. Is it not a favor thus to have caused us to enjoy the beauties of this Universe ? and do we not owe Him some gratitude in return for such a blessing? But a yet stronger reason establishes, confirms the universal chain of our duties; why should we refuse to fulfill those required by His decrees, since they are the very same which consolidate our happiness amongst mortals? Is it not sweet to feel that one renders oneself worthy of the Supreme Being simply by practicing those virtues which must bring about our contentment on earth, and that the means which render us worthy to live amongst our brethren are the identical ones which give us the assurance of a rebirth, in the life still to come, close by the throne of God! Ah, Rosalie! how blind are they who would strive to ravish away this our hope!

• From The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir (2004)

  Black, heeled platforms. The front pedestal raised the ball of my foot off the ground two and half inches, and the heel, that gloriously slim yet strong heel, raised me up a solid seven inches. Finally, for the first time since being on pointe, I felt myself to be taller than the truth. But most important, my feet were far above the ground: it is the place where I am at my best in both mind and body. And, if necessary, these shoes could deliver a very healthy kick. My new shoes became both shield and armor in the battle for a new way to live. I ended up buying pairs in all the other colors: silver, sky blue, and serious pink. Once strapped on, these shoes changed my entire demeanor. I became my own Amazon—Aphrodite, Artemis, and Athena rolled into one. A-Woman was born. Equal in height to most men, I was now taller than many. I walked slowly, deliberately, proudly, stupendously on my shimmering, high-heeled weapons. Hope sprang alive as I peered about from my new perch. No longer looking up, I was looking down. No longer Slave, I was Mistress: the only refuge for a submissive with no Master. I started wearing my shoes around the house. With sweatpants, with underwear, without underwear, dusting a shelf, doing the dishes. One time I even shaved my pussy in the heels in order to do the dishes. Therapy. And I continued to rinse out my ass every time I bathed—a gesture of hope in a vacant lot. Then, one day, as Leonard Cohen was singing “Dance Me to the End of Love” through the speakers, I started swaying to the music—“moving like they do in Babylon”—and I knew that I would be dancing again before too long in my “Don’t-Fuck-With-Me” shoes. I was healed. I had made the leap across the open chasm. It wasn’t as wide as I’d thought. All those abbreviated M-words were never bridge enough to the other side. I never really liked being a “Miss.” Too prissy. It was slightly better in French—“Mlle.”—but still felt wanting—too petite for my budding enormity. Then came the opportunity for “Mrs.” which felt horrendous, like my mother, and its dry, neutered alternative, “Ms.” The problem with them all is that what followed was always a man’s name—a father’s or a husband’s. Now I only recognize titles befitting a woman who belongs to herself. Having traveled the long and twisted road from Masochist to Mistress . . . What next? Madam? Muse? And with whom? Perhaps with a man who is difficult to love. A-Man provided no challenge in this regard. Loving him was so easy, too easy; not loving him was hell. So perhaps the opposite: loving that is difficult, leaving that is easy. Would I not then learn some tolerance?

• From Birthday Girl (2018)

  Quiero sonreír, porque mi corazón está henchido y se siente bien, pero también estoy llena de algo que no puedo identificar. Es como una docena de emociones diferentes inundándome a la vez, y lo único que puedo hacer es tomar pequeñas y superficiales bocanadas de aire. —Bien —le susurro. No estoy segura si lo que dijo fue lo que quería escuchar o lo que necesitaba escuchar, pero siento que mis hombros se cuadran un poco más y mi barbilla se levanta con buena disposición. Por el tiempo que dure, soy un poco más valiente, y él es mi nuevo héroe. Observo mientras saca una pequeña caja y procede a encender un fósforo, la pequeña llama brilla intensamente. Lo pone en una de las donas, todo el glaseado rosa que Shel pidió, porque sabe que es mi color favorito, brilla en la luz. Siento mi corazón calentarse por el gesto. Bajando los pies, me inclino hacia adelante, cierro los ojos y pido lo que quiero en mi cabeza, luego apago la llama. Sin embargo, no deseé lo que siempre deseo. Mi mente de repente queda en blanco, y no estoy recordando todas las cosas que necesito y quiero ahora mismo fuera de este teatro. Solo lo único en lo que puedo pensar. Ambos nos sentamos y nos acomodamos, cada uno con otra dona cuando las luces finalmente se atenúan, y el sonido envolvente nos golpea desde ambos lados del teatro. Durante los próximos noventa minutos, comemos y reímos, y escondo mi rostro un par de veces cuando sé que algo está por venir. Salto aquí y allá, y me río de él cuando lo hace, porque parece avergonzado. Después de un rato, noto que mi cabeza se inclina hacia él, y él tiene su pie sobre la silla vacía delante de nosotros con su cabeza inclinada, también, y estamos completamente cómodos. Ni siquiera se me ha ocurrido mantener una cierta distancia. No veo muchas películas con otras personas. No estoy acostumbrada a simplemente sentarme en silencio con alguien más. Los horarios de Cole y los míos no siempre se combinan, mi hermana Cam ya no tiene tiempo libre, y la mayoría de mis amistades de la escuela secundaria no duraron más allá de la graduación hace un año. Es agradable pasar el rato. En el momento en que se publican los créditos, no estoy segura de recordar gran parte de la película. Pero no he estado tan relajada en mucho tiempo. Me reí, sonreí, bromeé y olvidé todo lo que estaba sucediendo allí afuera, y lo necesitaba. Realmente no quiero volver a casa todavía. Las luces comienzan a encenderse y lentamente me siento, llevando mis pies al suelo mientras trago el nudo en mi garganta y lo miro. Él también se sienta, pero apenas se encuentra con mis ojos. De pie, paso la correa del bolso sobre mi cabeza y recojo mi basura.

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  Years ago, when I sat in a silent meditation retreat sponsored by the Mind and Life Institute held at the retreat center cofounded by my friend and collaborator Sharon Salzberg, one of our teachers shared a joke with us. It went something like this: On learning of a friend’s new (or renewed) devotion to meditation practice, an observer quipped, “Practice, practice, practice! All you ever do is practice! When’s the performance?” After a muted wave of chuckles rolled through the meditation hall, our teacher went on to say that there is indeed a performance scheduled; it’s called “Your Daily Life.” This is the mind-set about the practices in part II that I urge you to adopt. Whether you choose to shift your focus with formal meditation or with the informal micro-moment practices I’ve offered, I can guarantee you that merely dabbling in them one or two times will lead to no appreciable changes. You well know that engaging in one bout of vigorous physical exercise, or eating one stem of broccoli, will not do anything to improve your health. Your path to physical, emotional, and spiritual vitality is no different. So find activities that speak to you, and identify the recurring cues that might trigger you to do them. Let the micro-doses of positivity that these activities bring draw you to practice, practice, practice. Let these practices help you build new and life-expanding habits, habits that little by little remake you and the course of your day and your life from the inside out. Love 2.0: An Emotion Is Born? Even as I have been writing this book, the equivalent of a scholarly earthquake has been shaking the foundations of the science of emotions. The question at the root of this rattler is ages old, yet repeated most cogently now by my fellow emotions scientist Lisa Feldman Barrett with the force of considerable data. What Barrett and her collaborators (including one of my newest Carolina colleagues, Kristen Lindquist) have asked is simply, what is an emotion? William James himself devoted considerable attention to this very question back in 1884. In the current era, a typical scientific answer to this question describes a momentary emotional state—like anger, fear, or joy—as an organized set of responses to some new circumstance you face—like an insult, a clear danger, or sudden good fortune. These coordinated responses show up as discrete and identifiable changes in your facial movements and cardiovascular activity, in your subjective experience and action urges, and so on, all presumably orchestrated by discrete and identifiable changes in your brain. A hidden assumption is that the unique states of anger, fear, and joy are given to you by the basic design of your body and brain, as sculpted over millennia by Darwinian natural selection.

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  Instinctually, they can see some form of light in the darkness they face. In study after study, my collaborators and I find that it is precisely this infusion of positive emotions into negative emotional terrain that drives resilient people to bounce back. Perhaps you come by this sort of resilience naturally. For whatever reasons, you may have little trouble finding the value in difficult experiences, even if it’s only to discover the depths of your inner fortitude or your social support. But maybe resilience doesn’t come to you naturally. Maybe you flounder in the wake of upsets and struggle to regain your footing. Rest assured, people can and do become more resilient in time. All it takes is practice. With repeated practice, you can build new emotional habits that fuel a newfound and well-earned resilience. You, too, can bounce back from the many adversities you endure. And when you do, you’ll also discover a renewed capacity to offer positivity resonance to others, helping others to heal, grow, and bounce back as well. The place to start is with your own suffering. Try This Micro-moment Practice: Use Your Own Suffering as a Cue to Connect Whenever pain, suffering, or any form of adversity weaves its way into your own experience, take that very moment as a cue to practice compassion, to take tender care of yourself. Depending on the exact nature of your circumstances, your self-care may be swift, like yanking your hand away from a burning hot surface, or slow, like taking time to read or write poetry when you feel lost, numb, or otherwise disoriented. In either case, bring your full awareness to your painful predicament, putting a metaphorical (or literal) hand on your own shoulder as you witness your experience of it. The kindness and awareness that you give yourself draws more of the gilded threads into the tapestry of your own experience. There’s no need to deny or suppress difficult feelings. Simply allow the good and the bad to sit side by side, so that they can inform and influence each other. In doing so you plant seeds of hope: Even as you fear the worse, you yearn for better. Remind yourself that whatever painful predicament you now endure is—at this very moment—being faced by others as well. When it comes to suffering, after all, there’s scarcely anything new under the sun. While the particulars of your predicament may be unique, the bones of it are not. At one level or another, you’ll be able to recognize the shared elements in your difficult circumstances, whether it’s physical pain, social injustice, uncertainty about your own or another’s health, a crushing influx of demands, rejection, or a disorienting lack of direction. Take a step back from your own suffering and imagine yourself connected with others who suffer similarly.

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  As I detailed in Positivity , their agility stems from their steady diet of positive emotion. Each successive experience of positive emotion, after all, gives them a fresh experience of openness. Resilient people come to better register and appreciate the larger contexts of life, which allows them to respond to emotional upsets with more perspective, flexibility, and grace. Our data indeed show that life gets better and better for people who experience more positive emotions than others, not simply because positive emotions feel good, but because good feelings nourish resilience. Being better equipped to manage inevitable ups and downs is what makes life itself more satisfying. Resilient people are more hopeful, more excited to rise up to challenges, more appreciative of their many blessings. These positive emotions, our lab experiments show, help flush out any lingering aftereffects of negativity within you. They dismantle or undo the grip that negative emotions can gain on your mind and body alike, the grip that—when too long-lasting—can make you vulnerable to illness and even early death. The science of resilience has deepened considerably within the last decade. We’ve seen not only a groundswell of scientific interest in the topic but also a fundamental shift in how resilience is viewed. Before, experts saw resilience in the face of adversity as a rare human feat; we now know that, in the context of a well-functioning emotion system, resilience can be normative, or standard. We also now know that people’s levels of resilience are not set in stone, or DNA. They can be improved through experience and training. So as you practice the skills, detailed in part II of this book, to increase your daily diet of positivity resonance, you’ll become more resilient, too, better able to adapt to life’s inevitable upsets and adversity. Resilient people don’t go it alone. Even as kids, they were especially adept at using humor to get others to smile or laugh along with them. In these and other ways, resilient kids are adept at stoking positivity resonance with their friends and caretakers. Developmental psychologists contend that resilient kids cultivated this capacity through their experiences of sensitive parenting as infants. Some parents, more than others, are adept at interpreting and matching their infant’s ever-changing emotional states. They can smoothly repair their infant’s distress to create micro-moments of positivity resonance. These more sensitive and attuned parents help their children to develop their own store of self-soothing techniques, coping mechanisms that ultimately allow the children to become ever more self-sufficient as they grow older. Resilience, then, doesn’t just originate from positive emotions; it originates from positivity resonance. More often than not, you don’t face stress and adversity by yourself, alone. You face it together with others.

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  Even so, there is ample reason for hope. In countless social exchanges each day, your potential to alleviate loneliness with love is enormous. Your biology, as we have seen in this chapter, enacts your experiences of love. Even so, you have more control over your biology than you realize. Once you grasp the pathways and common obstacles to love, you gain a measure of control over the biochemicals that bathe your cells. To a considerable extent, you orchestrate the messages that your cells hear, the messages that tell your cells whether to grow toward health or toward illness. My collaborators and I are just beginning to chart the ways that oxytocin and other ingredients that make up love’s biochemistry trigger healthy changes in gene expression that may foster physical and mental well-being. Also through the plasticity of your cells, we hypothesize, love begets love. All of love’s unseen biological transformations—in your brain rhythms, your blood stream, your vagus nerve, and your cells—in turn ready you to become even more attuned to love, better equipped, biologically, to cultivate moments of positivity resonance with others. This latent biological upward spiral is a powerful force: Love can affect you so deeply that it reshapes you from the inside out and by doing so alters your destiny for further loving moments. With each micro-moment of love, then, as I feature in chapter 4, you climb another rung on the spiraling ladder that lifts you up to your higher ground, to richer and more compassionate social relationships, to greater resilience and wisdom, and to better physical health. Love 2.0: The View from Here Put simply, your body was designed for love, and to benefit from loving. Human bodies become healthier when repeatedly nourished by positivity resonance with others, with the result that human communities become more harmonious and loving. This clear win-win arrangement is written into our DNA. Everyday micro-moments of positivity resonance add up and ultimately transform your life for the better. You become healthier, happier, and more socially integrated. Your wisdom and resilience grow as well. Having more resources like these in turn equips you to experience micro-moments of love more readily and more often, with further broaden-and-build benefits. Your body, as biology has it, energizes and sustains this upward spiral. The unseen and heretofore unsung biology of love affects everything you feel, think, do, and become. This isn’t all about you, though. Love, as we’ve seen, is not a solo act. The benefits that unfold from love for you, then, also unfold for all those who are party to positivity resonance. Seen from this vantage point, emotional and physical health are contagious. Indeed, studies of actual social networks show that, over time, happiness spreads through whole communities. Your friend’s coworker’s sister’s happiness actually stands to elevate your own happiness.

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  Love 2.0: The View from Here Love, as we’ve seen here, ripples out through space and time. In a moment of positivity resonance, studies show, your awareness automatically expands, allowing you to appreciate more than you typically do. Also quite automatically, your body leans in toward and affirms the other person, and begins a subtle synchronized dance that further reinforces your connection. Over time, these powerful moments change who you are. They help expand your network of relationships and grow your resilience, wisdom, and physical health. These ripples don’t just affect you. They also affect the people with whom you share your moments of positivity resonance. So as you upgrade your view of love and learn to cultivate more micro-moments of it, you not only get benefits, you give benefits. This repeated back-and-forth sharing, however small or subtle, helps establish and strengthen healthy communities and cultures. “You are made in the image of what you desire,” Thomas Merton said. My aim in writing this book is to open your eyes to the wisdom of this claim and the scientific evidence that backs it up. Although a single desire may seem fleeting and ephemeral, when repeated and repeatedly acted on, desires become powerful, life-shaping forces. A single gust of wind, after it moves on, hardly alters the shape of a tree. Yet when you find all the trees in a given area leaning decidedly to the west, you can see the lasting effects of the prevailing winds. The new science of positivity resonance tells us that when you make love your prevailing desire, you remake whole domains of your life. You become appreciably and enduringly different, and better. You uplift others, helping them become different and better as well. My hope is that digesting the science I offer you here in part I has awakened your desire for love, for more positivity resonance in your day. You now know how deeply and pervasively love affects you. Now you are ready to begin making the changes—even very small adjustments—that will help you foster more and better loving moments. In part II, I offer you guidance for doing just that. CHAPTER 6 Loving Self I EXIST AS I AM, THAT IS ENOUGH. IF NO OTHER IN THE WORLD BE AWARE I SIT CONTENT. AND IF EACH AND ALL BE AWARE I SIT CONTENT. —Walt Whitman The old saying tells us that we can’t love others unless we first love ourselves. It’s true. Even though love is defined throughout this book as moments of positivity shared between and among people, the positivity shared between knower and known—between I and me —provides a vital foundation for all other forms of love. We first need to accept ourselves fully, as worthy partners in positivity, before we can freely enjoy the many other fruits of positivity resonance that we can share with others. Like all forms of positivity resonance, self-love requires both safety and connection. Either of two obstacles may stand in the way.

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  What I’ve found is that even though you experience positive emotions as exquisitely subtle and brief, such moments can ignite powerful forces of growth in your life. They do this first by opening you up: Your outlook quite literally expands as you come under the influence of any of several positive emotions. Put simply, you see more as your vision widens; you see the bigger picture. With this momentarily broadened, more encompassing mind-set, you become more flexible, attuned to others, creative, and wise. Over time, you also become more resourceful. This is because, little by little, these mind-expanding moments of positive emotions add up to reshape your life for the better, making you more knowledgeable, more resilient, more socially integrated, and healthier. In fact, science documents that positive emotions can set off upward spirals in your life, self-sustaining trajectories of growth that lift you up to become a better version of yourself. These two core facts about positive emotions—that they open you up and transform you for the better—form the two anchor points for my broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions, which I wrote about in my first book, Positivity, to show how you can put positive emotions to work as you navigate your days to overcome negativity and thrive. The word positivity is purposefully broad. I chose it to cover the full range of positive emotions and then some. It also spans the psychological conditions that seed your positive emotions as well as their myriad effects—the slowing rhythm of your heart, the opening of your mind, and the relaxed, inviting look on your face. It even encompasses the fruits of positive emotions that ripen for you only a season later—their mounting effects on your relationships, your character, your health and spiritual growth. Here, you could protest and say that I’ve roped too much into this one term. Yet I see real value in using an encompassing word like positivity. It lassos the fuller dynamic system in which love and other positive emotions operate. Positive emotions are the tiny engines that drive this intricate, ever-churning positivity system. They are the active ingredients that set the rest in motion. Yet when I step back from the proverbial microscope to examine the larger system that orbits around your positive emotions, I see how positive emotions knit you into the fabric of life, the social fabric that unites you with others, and how they orchestrate the ways you grow and rebound through changing circumstances. I needed a new word to encompass that broader system, and that’s positivity. Keeping an eye on this fuller positivity system enables a more precise definition of love, which I provide in chapter 2. Love—like all the other positive emotions—follows the ancestral logic of broaden and build: Those pleasant yet fleeting moments of connection that you experience with others expand your awareness in ways that accrue to create lasting and beneficial changes in your life.

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  Likewise, nearly half of all single people say they yearn to find their own happiness by finding their own special person to love. While these numbers certainly varied culture by culture, they strike me as a worldwide collapse of imagination. Thinking of love purely as the romance or commitment that you share with one special person—as it appears most on earth do—surely limits the health and happiness you derive from micro-moments of positivity resonance. Put differently, your beliefs about what love is become self-fulfilling prophecies. If, for instance, you think love can in fact also bloom between you and the utter stranger with whom you connect for only a few minutes at the airport, then it more readily can. If, by contrast, you think love can bloom only between you and a special, predesignated one, then you’ve severely limited the prospects for yourself and that kindly person at the airport. Think of the old-school view of love as pouring a thick layer of cement over a garden that has been planted with a thousand flower bulbs. Although any single flower might still push its way through cracks in the cement and bloom nevertheless, the odds are severely stacked against it. Yet by upgrading your view of love to recognize its full scope, you break up and remove this cement to let a thousand flowers bloom. Positivity resonance exists, whether you adopt a new view of love or not. It remains the ancient life-giving, soul-stretching state that your body craves. The difference you get with an upgrade is whether you are awake to the thousands of opportunities that surround you for fulfilling this craving. When you awaken to this new understanding of your heart’s potential, a new and life-changing emotion is born within you. Do-It-Yourself Gene Expression? Also in the span of time that I’ve written this book, my research team and I have been making new discoveries about how your experiences of love may be either amplified or muffled by the expression of certain genes within your cells. As sketched back in chapter 3, we’ve already discovered that people with higher cardiac vagal tone somehow extract a larger and more immediate positive jolt out of their efforts to practice the style of mediation, LKM, that I’ve featured prominently in part II. Even more inspiring, we found that practicing LKM actually raises people’s vagal tone such that positive feelings and higher vagal tone feed each other over time. In our most recent experiment, we obtained blood samples from study volunteers before they tried out meditation for the first time. By the flip of a coin, they tried either LKM or a different style of mediation, one that does not aim to cultivate loving feelings. Before and immediately after their assigned guided meditation, we asked them to rate the extent of their positive feelings.

• From Summer Sisters (1998)

  They keep you real busy but you don’t get tired. You’re never tired. And no medicine either. Everyone’s healthy. Strong. You know? Once a week you got to meet with God. Either him or St. Peter. You got to report on how things are going. But there’s no wrong answers in heaven. There’s no report cards . Me? I’m gonna be a ballet dancer or maybe an ice princess like in the Olympics. Just twirl around all day and eat Fruit Roll-Ups . Zillions of puppies … that’s what they got up in heaven. The softest dogs you’ve ever seen. And no poop. I don’t know what happens to the poop but it’s not in heaven. Because heaven’s clean. All those fluffy white clouds. And these zillions of puppies just jumping from cloud to cloud and you get to run and chase them all day . Abby called Vix. “What can I do to help? Would you like something delivered to the editing room … something besides pizza?” Abby kept her in touch, kept them all in touch. Daniel was doing well in his second year at Yale Law, but not as well as he’d thought. Gus was finishing his master’s in journalism at Columbia and had been offered a job in Albuquerque, of all places. Sharkey was turning into a brilliant scientist. And Caitlin, as she already knew, was a latter-day Zelda Fitzgerald with castanets. “Should we start making plans for graduation?” Abby asked. “Are your parents coming? Can we throw a party or do you and Bru have other plans?” She couldn’t begin to think about graduation. She was consumed by her thesis. She discovered creative energies she didn’t even know she had. She’d fall into bed exhausted after midnight and be up at six to start again. She had to keep up with her regular courses, too. Just because it was senior year she wasn’t off the hook. This was Harvard, after all. And a Harvard degree stood for something. Just ask any graduate. Bru said, “I’ll be glad when it’s done. I don’t like anything that keeps us apart.” He asked her to talk sexy to him over the phone. “Tell me what you want me to do to you. Tell me what you’d do to me.” So she told him. Natalie Ponzo talked up Five Minutes in Heaven . It was suggested she send a copy to WGBH. She had an interview with the producers of Nova who offered a summer internship but not a real job. She thanked them and sent a copy to Jocelyn, who was working at an industrial film production house in New York. Jocelyn showed the tape around but cautioned Vix against taking a job with her company. It was a job leading nowhere, she’d discovered. She had to waitress weekends to make ends meet. She’d already given notice.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  It was a wonderful feeling - but a fearful one, too, for you felt all the time that you didn’t deserve your own good fortune; that you had received it quite by error, in someone else’s place - and that it might be taken from you while your gaze was turned elsewhere. And there was nothing you would not do, I thought, nothing you would not sacrifice, to keep your heart’s desire once you had been given it. I knew that Kitty and I felt just the same - only, of course, about different things. I should have remembered this, later. We unpacked, as I have said, for an hour, and while we worked I caught the sound of various shouts and stirrings in the rest of the house. Now - it was six o‘clock or so - there came the creak of footsteps on the landing beneath ours, and a cry: ‘Miss Butler, Miss Astley!’ It was Mrs Dendy, come to tell us that there was a bit of dinner for us, if we wanted it, in the downstairs parlour - and ‘quite a crowd, besides, that’d like to meet you’. I was hungry, but also weary, and sick of shaking hands and smiling into strangers’ faces; but Kitty whispered that we had better go down, or the other lodgers would think us proud. So we called to Mrs Dendy to give us a moment, and while Kitty changed her dress I combed and re-plaited my hair, and beat the dust from the hem of my skirt into the fireplace, and washed my hands; and then we made our way downstairs. The parlour was a very different room, now, to the one that we had sat and taken tea in on our arrival. The table had been opened out and pulled into the centre of the room, and set for dinner; more importantly, it was ringed with faces, every one of which looked up as we appeared and broke into a smile - the same quick, well-practised smile which shone from all the pictures on the walls. It was as if half-a-dozen of the portraits had come to life and stepped from behind their dusty panes to join Mrs Dendy for supper.

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  What struck him most was that negative emotions shout out and drag on, whereas positive emotions are “like the quiet kid in the room that no one ever pays attention to.” This helped him remember that if he could cultivate and savor those quiet and fleeting positive emotions—and help his students do the same—then together they could leverage feeling good to build their resources and resilience. He admitted to me that before he fell into the funk of this all-time low point of his life, all of these ideas had merely remained abstract to him, interesting ideas, to be sure, but they didn’t feel real. Now, together with the support of his supervisors and TFA mentors, they were forming a lifeline. He realized that what needed to change first and foremost was his own attitude. As he put it, “I was not celebrating education in any way.” True, he’d been given a difficult assignment. But he realized that if he made the effort to look at his situation in another way, he could also see that he’d been given “a rare opportunity to actually change these kids’ lives in a positive way, to actually rekindle their love for learning.” He began to see teaching as “a bi- directional relationship. They may be pretty despondent, but look at me. I am certainly not the life of the classroom when I walk in!” That’s when he decided to take a break from teaching basic math to build real relationships with and between his kids. “I said let’s get to know each other, so we played games.” He asked the students to share something about themselves, how many brothers or sisters they had, their thoughts about their town, anything to break the ice. He asked them to write stories about themselves, telling “who they were, what their worst experiences in life had been, what made them happy.” After one kid was bold enough to share his own story, “the stories poured out.” He said it was like penguins lining up along “the edge of an iceberg” all peering down at the water, and then “one jumps in and if it’s safe then everyone else jumps.” The kids began to open up, telling of dads who weren’t around or moms who were struggling to feed the family on food stamps. They shared their fears, alongside their hobbies and hopes. Ty had built his own stock car and had recently won two thousand dollars racing it. Tisha shared that she wanted to be a nurse. They learned to trust their classmates and to honor what each shared. He even devoted a few class sessions to basic lessons from the science of positive emotions, which he attributed to “Dr. Fredrickson” back at Carolina. He asked them to recall a time that they felt down or upset.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Constantine first distinguished himself in the service of Diocletian in the Egyptian and Persian wars; went afterwards to Gaul and Britain, and in the Praetorium at York was proclaimed emperor by his dying father and by the Roman troops. His father before him held a favorable opinion of the Christians as peaceable and honorable citizens, and protected them in the West during the Diocletian persecution in the East. This respectful tolerant regard descended to Constantine, and the good effects of it, compared with the evil results of the opposite course of his antagonist Galerius, could but encourage him to pursue it. He reasoned, as Eusebius reports from his own mouth, in the following manner: "My father revered the Christian God and uniformly prospered, while the emperors who worshipped the heathen gods, died a miserable death; therefore, that I may enjoy a happy life and reign, I will imitate the example of my father and join myself to the cause of the Christians, who are growing daily, while the heathen are diminishing." This low utilitarian consideration weighed heavily in the mind of an ambitious captain, who looked forward to the highest seat of power within the gift of his age. Whether his mother, whom he always revered, and who made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in her eightieth year (A.D. 325), planted the germ of the Christian faith in her son, as Theodoret supposes, or herself became a Christian through his influence, as Eusebius asserts, must remain undecided. According to the heathen Zosimus, whose statement is unquestionably false and malicious, an Egyptian, who came out of Spain (probably the bishop Hosius of Cordova, a native of Egypt, is intended), persuaded him, after the murder of Crispus (which did not occur before 326), that by converting to Christianity he might obtain forgiveness of his sins. The first public evidence of a positive leaning towards the Christian religion he gave in his contest with the pagan Maxentius, who had usurped the government of Italy and Africa, and is universally represented as a cruel, dissolute tyrant, hated by heathens and Christians alike,16 called by the Roman people to their aid, Constantine marched from Gaul across the Alps with an army of ninety-eight thousand soldiers of every nationality, and defeated Maxentius in three battles; the last in October, 312, at the Milvian bridge, near Rome, where Maxentius found a disgraceful death in the waters of the Tiber.

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  He realized that what needed to change first and foremost was his own attitude. As he put it, “I was not celebrating education in any way.” True, he’d been given a difficult assignment. But he realized that if he made the effort to look at his situation in another way, he could also see that he’d been given “a rare opportunity to actually change these kids’ lives in a positive way, to actually rekindle their love for learning.” He began to see teaching as “a bi-directional relationship. They may be pretty despondent, but look at me. I am certainly not the life of the classroom when I walk in!” That’s when he decided to take a break from teaching basic math to build real relationships with and between his kids. “I said let’s get to know each other, so we played games.” He asked the students to share something about themselves, how many brothers or sisters they had, their thoughts about their town, anything to break the ice. He asked them to write stories about themselves, telling “who they were, what their worst experiences in life had been, what made them happy.” After one kid was bold enough to share his own story, “the stories poured out.” He said it was like penguins lining up along “the edge of an iceberg” all peering down at the water, and then “one jumps in and if it’s safe then everyone else jumps.” The kids began to open up, telling of dads who weren’t around or moms who were struggling to feed the family on food stamps. They shared their fears, alongside their hobbies and hopes. Ty had built his own stock car and had recently won two thousand dollars racing it. Tisha shared that she wanted to be a nurse. They learned to trust their classmates and to honor what each shared.

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Of saintdom, and to clamor, moan, and sob Battering the gates of heaven with storms of prayer: Have mercy, Lord, and take away my sin. * * * * * * Oh take the meaning, Lord: I do not breathe, Not whisper, any murmur of complaint. Pain heaped ten hundredfold to this, were still Less burthen, by ten hundredfold, to bear, Than were those lead-like tons of sin, that crushed My spirit flat before Thee. O Lord, Lord, Thou knowest I bore this better at the first, For I was strong and hale of body then; And though my teeth, which now are dropt away, Would chatter with the cold, and all my beard Was tagged with icy fringes in the moon, I drowned the whoopings of the owl with sound Of pious hymns and psalms, and sometimes saw An angel stand and watch me, as I sang. Now am I feeble grown: my end draws nigh— I hope my end draws nigh: half deaf I am, So that I scarce can hear the people hum About the column’s base; and almost blind, And scarce can recognize the fields I know. And both my thighs are rotted with the dew, Yet cease I not to clamor and to cry, While my stiff spine can hold my weary head, Till all my limbs drop piecemeal from the stone: Have mercy, mercy; take away my sin." Yet Symeon was not only concerned about his own salvation. People streamed from afar to witness this standing wonder of the age. He spoke to all classes with the same friendliness, mildness, and love; only women he never suffered to come within the wall which surrounded his pillar. From this original pulpit, as a mediator between heaven and earth, he preached repentance twice a day to the astonished spectators, settled controversies, vindicated the orthodox faith, extorted laws even from an emperor, healed the sick wrought miracles, and converted thousands of heathen Ishmaelites, Iberians, Armenians, and Persians to Christianity, or at least to the Christian name. All this the celebrated Theodoret relates as an eyewitness during the lifetime of the saint. He terms him the great wonder of the world,330 and compares him to a candle on a candlestick, and to the sun itself, which sheds its rays on every side. He asks the objector to this mode of life to consider that God often uses very striking means to arouse the negligent, as the history of the prophets shows;331 and concludes his narrative with the remark: "Should the saint live longer, he may do yet greater wonders, for he is a universal ornament and honor of religion." He died in 459, in the sixty-ninth year of his age, of a long-concealed and loathsome ulcer on his leg; and his body was brought in solemn procession to the metropolitan church Of Antioch.

• From Birthday Girl (2018)

  —¡Detente! —lo regaño en un susurro mientras miro nerviosamente a la casa de dos pisos detrás de mí—. Ya no tenemos privacidad. Sonríe. —Mi papá todavía está en el trabajo, nena. No estará en casa hasta alrededor de las cinco. Oh. Bueno, al menos eso es bueno. Miro a un lado y al otro de la calle del vecindario, viendo una casa tras otra, las cortinas abiertas y niños jugando aquí y allá. No es como en los apartamentos donde todo el mundo se entera de todo, pero realmente no importa, porque estás de forma temporal y no te quedarás lo suficiente como para que nadie piense que mereces su atención. Aquí, en un vecindario de verdad, las personas invierten su tiempo en quién vive al lado. Respiro profundamente, empapándome del olor de las parrillas y el sonido de las cortadoras de césped. Es un barrio realmente agradable. Me pregunto si esta podría ser yo algún día. ¿Encontraré un buen trabajo? ¿Tendré una buena casa? ¿Seré feliz? Cole inclina su frente hacia la mía otra vez. —Lo siento. —No me mira, sino al suelo—. Sigo arruinando las cosas, y no sé por qué. Soy tan inquieto. Simplemente no puedo… Pero no termina. Solo sacude la cabeza, y lo sé. Siempre lo sé. Cole no es un perdedor. Tiene diecinueve años. Es impulsivo, está enojado y confundido. Pero a diferencia de mí, nunca tuvo que crecer. Siempre hay alguien que se ocupa de él. —Sabes quién debes ser —le digo—. Comprometerse a eso es un proceso diferente para todos, pero llegarás allí. Alza la mirada, y un momento de duda cruza su mirada como si fuera a decir algo, pero luego se fue. En su lugar, muestra su pequeña sonrisa arrogante. —No te merezco —contesta, y luego me da una palmada en el trasero. Me estremezco, conteniendo mi molestia mientras nos separamos. No, no me mereces. Pero eres lindo y das buenos masajes. Terminamos de descargar el auto y hacemos varios viajes de ida y vuelta, llevando todo a la casa. Dejo los pocos alimentos que compré antes en la cocina y luego llevo una última caja por la sala de estar y subo las escaleras hasta nuestra habitación, la primera a la izquierda. Inhalo profundamente mientras giro la puerta de entrada de nuestra nueva habitación, incapaz de ocultar mi sonrisa ante el olor a pintura fresca. Por el aspecto de la casa en la que nos estamos mudando, el padre de Cole la está renovando. Aunque parece que la mayor parte del trabajo principal está hecho. Había relucientes pisos de madera en la planta baja, con molduras de corona en cada habitación, encimeras de granito en la cocina con todos los electrodomésticos de acero inoxidable nuevos, y los gabinetes de vidrio y negro hicieron que mi corazón se agitara un poco. Nunca había vivido en un lugar ni remotamente tan agradable. Para un trabajador de construcción, Pike Lawson no es un mal diseñador.

• From Summer Sisters (1998)

  She was a great believer in luck. Every week she bought a lottery ticket from the newsstand near her office because, as the guy in the commercial said, Hey … you never know … She even signed up for a junket to Atlantic City in early April just to see what all the hoopla was about. Gus had taught her to play poker the summer she was seventeen, the last summer they’d shared the house with the Chicago Boys. He’d been impressed with her stone-cold expression. You don’t give away a thing, do you, Cough Drop? Never , she’d told him. Sometimes she dreamed about how it would feel if her ship came in. About how she would spend all that money. But she wasn’t as certain now as she’d been at fourteen. She withdrew a hundred dollars from the ATM near her office in preparation for her trip. But she didn’t take her checkbook or credit cards. That way there’d be no danger of blowing more than she could afford, not that she could afford even a hundred, given her salary and expenses, but just this once couldn’t hurt. Maia and Paisley were heading out to the Hamptons to look for a summer share. They’d wanted her to join them but Vix said, “Not this weekend.” “She’s probably got a hot date lined up and doesn’t want us to know,” Maia joked. “Something like that,” she told them. For added luck, she wrapped her piano shawl over her raincoat. She felt exotic when she wore it, like a flamenco dancer. And if she didn’t exactly find luck in At lantic City, she found Luke. She wouldn’t tell Maia and Paisley they met at the craps table. No one ever had to know the truth unless she and Luke wound up together. Then Maia would say, Can you believe Vix met Luke at a casino in Atlantic City? At the craps table? No, they wouldn’t believe it. She kept her impulsive side to herself. She’d once overheard Maia telling a friend at school, Victoria is the least spontaneous person in our entire class, but I’d trust her with my life . Actually, she didn’t really meet Luke at the craps table. She watched him. He was hot, on a roll, with a stack of chips in front of him that doubled and tripled every time he threw the dice. He was boyish, flush with excitement. She didn’t know it was a twenty-dollar table until she tried to place a bet. Embarrassed, she quickly retrieved her dollar chips. She hung around to watch anyway, as the crowd cheered Luke on, betting with him. He looked up once, caught her eye, and smiled. At the end of the day, as she was playing a slot machine, he came up behind her, dropped a quarter into the slot, covered her hand with his, and pulled the handle.

• From Summer Sisters (1998)

  “I take it that means no?” “Come on, Caitlin ...” “Where’s your sense of adventure ... your curiosity?” “Obviously not where yours is!” Caitlin sighed. “Besides,” Vix said, “if you’re really a lesbian you’ll be more distracted at Wellesley than a coed school.” “Good point,” Caitlin said. Still, she didn’t send in any other applications and in spite of her study habits she was accepted. Abby convinced Vix to apply to Harvard. “It’s Lamb’s alma mater. He’ll write a letter of recommendation for you.” Harvard? She’d never thought about any school but UNM. But Harvard was in Cambridge, close enough to the Vineyard to commute, if not every day then at least once a week. And Abby and Lamb lived there. She’d have family. So maybe those weren’t the best reasons for choosing a school but who cared? She didn’t think she had a prayer of getting in but she filled out the application anyway. When it came to listing her special talents all that came to mind was Victoria is a good listener. Her seventh-grade English teacher had written that on her final report card. Was there a way to translate listening into a talent? And if so, how would she describe it? Caitlin Somers chose me as her summer sister because I was smart but quiet. She knew I wouldn’t ask a million questions and get in the way. She thought about the day she and Caitlin had gone to see The Turning Point, about best friends, ballerinas, who chose different paths, one giving up performing to marry and have children, the other giving up everything else to perform. “I can’t imagine wasting all that talent,” Caitlin had said, identifying with the character played by Anne Bancroft. “Suppose you’re not that talented?” Vix asked. “Are you saying I’m not?” “I’m just saying not everyone has that kind of talent.” “But we do.” “Really?” “Yes,” Caitlin said. “I can juggle and you can ... do jigsaw puzzles.” “That’ll get us far!” They’d exploded with laughter and rolled around on the floor until their sides ached.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  It would be a kind of parting gift, I thought, for Ralph and Florence. I would be like a girl in a fairy story, sweeping out the dwarves’ cottage, or the robbers’ cave, while the dwarves or the robbers were at work. I believe I laboured, that day, harder than I had ever laboured over anything before; and I have wondered since, thinking back to the industry of those hours, whether the thing that I was really washing was not my own tarnished soul. I began by lighting a bigger fire in the range, to heat more water with. Then I found that I had used up all the water in the house: I had to limp up and down Quilter Street with two great buckets, looking for a stand-pipe; and when I found one I also found a line of women at it, and had to wait amongst them for half-an-hour, until the tap - which ran no faster than a trickle, and sometimes only spluttered and choked - was free. The women looked me up and down, rather - they looked at my eye, and more especially at my head, for I had placed a cap of Ralph’s upon it in lieu of my damp hat, and they could see where the hair was shorn and razored beneath. But they were not at all unfriendly. One or two, who had seen me leave the house, asked me, ‘Was I lodging with the Banners?’ and I answered that I was only passing through. They seemed happy enough with that, as if people passed through, in this district, very frequently. When I had staggered home with the water, set it warming on the stove, and wrapped myself in a great, crusty apron I found hanging on the back of the pantry door, I began on the parlour. First I wiped down all the dim and sooty things with a wet cloth; then I washed the window, and then the skirting-boards. The rugs I carried out into the yard: here I hung them over the wash-line, and beat them until my arm ached. As I did so, the back door of the neighbouring house was pulled open and a woman, her sleeves rolled up like mine and her own cheeks flushed, emerged to stand upon the step. When she saw me she nodded, and I nodded back. ‘A fine job you’ve taken on,’ she said, ‘cleaning the Banners’ place.’ I smiled, glad of the rest, and wiped the sweat from my brow and lip. ‘Are they known for their dirt, then?’ ‘They are,’ she said, ‘in this street. They do too much in other folks’ houses, and not enough in their own.