Wilder, Khouri, Coursey, & Sutton (Joy Starts Here, p. 185)
- Responses to Weakness
Many people raised with low-joy find that the first thing on their faces or out of their mouths is a low-joy response to the weaknesses they see. Many cultures are so shaped to punish weakness that everyone pounces on faults. Parents pounce as they are "preparing their children to face the world" rather than fitting them for a joyful, multigenerational community of hope. It is easy to hate ourselves for our weaknesses.
Wilder, Khouri, Coursey, & Sutton (Joy Starts Here, p. 184)
- Generational Transfer of Joy Skills
Texting LOL or "laugh out loud" does not have the same effect as hearing someone we love break into laughter. Is there a person in our life with a laugh that is contagious and makes us smile? These feelings are the result of real-time interactions. The transfer of skills depends on an older generation with the skills interacting with younger and weaker groups who lack the skills. We need to have a lot of interaction with the skilled population that is rapidly disappearing.
Captain Bill Sanders, U.S. Navy
- Electromagnetic Pulse: A Bolt from the Gray (afterward to 'One Second After')
A well-designed nuclear weapon detonated at a high altitude over Kansas could have damaging effects over virtually all of the continental United States... Our vulnerability increases daily as our use and dependence on electronics continues to accelerate... One second after an EMP attack, it will be too late to ask two simple questions: what should we have done to prevent the attack and why didn't we do it?
Glenn Stanton
- What is the Actual Divorce Rate?
There's a great deal of confusion among people about what the actual divorce rate in the United States is today. Some say it's 50%... The refined divorce rate indicates that currently 19 of every 1,000 marriages ends in divorce. Paul Amato, one of a small handful of leading scholars studying such things, adds: "An advantage of the refined divorce rate is that it has a clear interpretation... Currently, that number is about 2%."
Wilder, Khouri, Coursey & Sutton
- Joy Starts Here, p. 105: Pseudo-me
The problem for people is that we must kill ourselves inside to appear strong on the outside. Our brains can only create a pseudo-me out of the same parts of the brain we would use to create a real me. When we create a pseudo-me that is dominant it will slowly take over the operations of our brain. Like an invasive species, this pseudo-me robs the real me of vitality. The problem is that this puffed up and powerful sounding self believes its own delusional lies.
Robert Robinson (1758)
- Come Thou Fount
Oh to grace how great a debtor daily I'm constrained to be! Let thy goodness, like a fetter, bind my wandering heart to thee... Here's my heart, O take and seal it; Seal it for thy courts above.
Coach Herb Brooks, Miracle
- This is Your Time
You were born to be hockey players - every one of ya. And you were meant to be here tonight. This is your time. Their time - is done. It's over. I'm sick and tired of hearin' about what a great team the Soviets have. Screw 'em! This is your time! Now go out there and take it!
Willy Wonka
- Dreamers of Dreams
Willy Wonka: "Try some more. The strawberries taste like strawberries! The Snozzberries taste like Snozzberries!" Veruca Salt: "Snozzberries? Who ever heard of a Snozzberry?" Willy Wonka: "We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams."
Ernest Hemingway
- The Old Man and the Sea
It was too good to last, he thought. I wish it had been a dream now and that I had never hooked the fish and was alone in bed on the newspapers. "But man is not made for defeat," he said. "A man can be destroyed but not defeated."
John Steinbeck
- Cannery Row
"I had a wife," Mack said. "Same thing. Ever'thing I done turned sour. She couldn't stand it any more. If I done a good thing it got poisoned up some way. If I give her a present they was something wrong with it. She only got hurt from me. She couldn't stand it no more. Same thing ever' place 'til I just got to clowning. I don't do nothin' but clown no more. Try to make the boys laugh."
Ernest Hemingway
- The Old Man and the Sea
He is a great fish and I must convince him, he thought. I must never let him learn his strength nor what he could do if he made his run. If I were him I would put in everything now and go until something broke. But, thank God, they are not as intelligent as we who kill them; although they are more noble and more able.
J. R. R. Tolkien
- Gandalf: Death in Judgement (p. 58)
Deserves it! I dare to say he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment.
Jack Gardner
- Of Mice and Men
George stood up. "We'll do her," he said. "We'll fix up that little old place an' we'll go live there." He sat down again. They all sat still, all bemused by the beauty of the thing, each mind was popped into the future when this lovely thing should come about.
Aldous Huxley
- Brave New World
"But people never are alone now," said Mustapha Mond. "We make them hate solitude; and we arrange their lives so that it's almost impossible for them ever to have it."
M. Chris Mason
- Nation-Building is an Oxymoron
A nation is a country or a territory in which the great majority of the inhabitants center their personal identities at a national level... "Nation-building" is, therefore, an oxymoron... no country in world history which was not a nation has ever become a successful democracy.
John Steinbeck
- Cannery Row
When you collect marine animals there are certain flat worms so delicate that they are almost impossible to capture whole, for they break and tatter under the touch. You must let them ooze and crawl of their own will onto a knife blade and then lift them gently into your bottle of sea water. And perhaps that might be the way to write this book - to open the page and to let the stories crawl in by themselves.
Eugene Peterson
- A Long Obedience in the Same Direction
For those who choose to live no longer as tourists but as pilgrims, the Songs of Ascents combine all the cheerfulness of a travel song with the practicality of a guidebook and map. Their unpretentious brevity is excellently described by William Faulkner. "They are not monuments, but footprints. A monument only says, 'At least I got this far,' while a footprint says, 'This is where I was when I moved again.' "
Miller & Rollnick
- Evocation
Consider two different approaches to education. The first is to lecture, essentially to insert knowledge. Open up the head, install facts, and suture... This perspective starts very much from a deficit model, that the person is lacking what is needed... The contrasting approach is to draw out (literally in Latin, e ducere), as in drawing water from a well.
Miller & Rollnick
- Ambivalence
Consider... that most people who need to make a change are ambivalent about doing so. They see both reasons to change and reasons not to. They want to change and they don't want to, all at the same time. It is a normal human experience. In fact, it is an ordinary part of the change process, a step along the way. If you're ambivalent, you're one step closer to changing.
Wilder, Khouri, Coursey & Sutton
- Joy Starts Here
There are two major kinds of emotions in the brain... right-sided emotions require joy and relationship to resolve where left-sided emotions require truth or action. As essential emotional skills for managing right-sided emotions disappear from our families and cultures, we are trying harder to change our feelings by changing our thinking when that will only work for half of our emotions.
