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The chains of addiction are internal and invisible. They first shackle the mind, then the body. The process of addiction seizes powerful neural circuits and directs them towards behaviors that make it difficult to adapt.
In the brain affected by addiction, the rational parts, which regulate impulses in the cortex, are poorly developed even before addiction sets in, being further affected by drug use.

His disillusionment with Mary, whom he had thought of angelic purity, and his sense of injury, were so strong that they brought him to despair, and the despair led him—to what? To God, to his childhood's faith which had never been destroyed in him.

Kasatsky belonged to those men of the eighteen-forties (they are now no longer to be found) who while deliberately and without any conscientious scruples condoning impurity in themselves, required ideal and angelic purity in their women, regarded all unmarried women of their circle as possessed of such purity, and treated them accordingly.

dezvoltarea creierului în perioada intrauterină și în timpul copilăriei este factorul biologic cel mai important în a determina dacă o persoană va fi sau nu predispusă la dependență de substanțe sau la comportamente de dependență de orice fel, fie ele legate de droguri sau nu.

oamenii își pun viețile in pericol din dorința de a face momentul să fie vrednic de a fi trăit. nimic nu-i convinge să renunțe- nici boala, nici iubirea și relațiile sacrificate, nici pierderea bunurilor materiale, nici demnitatea lor zdrobită, nici teama de moarte.

All these beautiful and interesting sounds filled my heart with an unwonted expectation; and it appeared to me that, once past this range which I was mounting, I should descend into the garden of the world. Nor was I deceived, for I was now done with rains and winds and a bleak country. The first part of my journey ended here; and this was like an induction of sweet sounds into the other and more beautiful.

“The bed was made, the room was fit,
By punctual eve the stars were lit;
The air was still, the water ran;
No need there was for maid or man,
When we put up, my ass and I,
At God’s green caravanserai.
OLD PLAY.”

it is not always the most faithful believer who makes the cunningest apostle.

I was troubled besides in my mind as to etiquette. Durst I address a person who was under a vow of silence? Clearly not. But drawing near, I doffed my cap to him with a far-away superstitious reverence. He nodded back, and cheerfully addressed me. Was I going to the monastery? Who was I? An Englishman? Ah, an Irishman, then?

‘No,’ I said, ‘a Scotsman.’

It was grateful to come, after so long, upon a scene of some attraction for the human heart. I own I like definite form in what my eyes are to rest upon; and if landscapes were sold, like the sheets of characters of my boyhood, one penny plain and twopence coloured, I should go the length of twopence every day of my life.

They told me when I started,& was ready to believe it,that before a few days I should come to love Modestine like a dog.Three days had passed,we had shared some misadventures,& my heart was still as cold as a potato towards my beast of burden.She was pretty enough to look at;but then she had given proof of dead stupidity,redeemed indeed by patience,but aggravated by flashes of sorry and ill-judged light-heartedness

It was wild weather and famishing cold. I ate some chocolate, swallowed a mouthful of brandy, and smoked a cigarette before the cold should have time to disable my fingers. And by the time I had got all this done, and had made my pack and bound it on the pack-saddle, the day was tiptoe on the threshold of the east. The sun sent a glow of gold over some cloud mountains that lay ranged along the eastern sky.

When I came back to the inn for a bit of breakfast, the landlady was in the kitchen combing out her daughter’s hair;and I made her my compliments upon its beauty.
Oh no, said the mother;it is not so beautiful as it ought to be.Look, it is too fine.
Thus does a wise peasantry console itself under adverse physical circumstances,&,by a startling democratic process,the defects of the majority decide the type of beauty

I remembered having laughed myself when I had seen good men struggling with adversity in the person of a jackass, and the recollection filled me with penitence. That was in my old light days, before this trouble came upon me. God knows at least that I shall never laugh again, thought I. But oh, what a cruel thing is a farce to those engaged in it!

It will readily be conceived that I could not carry this huge package on my own, merely human, shoulders. It remained to choose a beast of burden. Now, a horse is a fine lady among animals, flighty, timid, delicate in eating, of tender health; he is too valuable and too restive to be left alone, so that you are chained to your brute as to a fellow galley-slave; a dangerous road puts him out of his wits;

But we are all travellers in what John Bunyan calls the wilderness of this world—all, too, travellers with a donkey: and the best that we find in our travels is an honest friend. He is a fortunate voyager who finds many. We travel, indeed, to find them. They are the end and the reward of life. They keep us worthy of ourselves; and when we are alone, we are only nearer to the absent.

The past seems to echo with the sound of breaking crockery.

With all our horrors and our faults, somewhere in us there is a shining. That is the most important of all facts. There is a shining.

Oh, I've had things like that happen to me, things that made me dumb and sick. You see, Victor, we're a kind of a little world inside a world. We have a whole life and pattern most people just don't know about. Lots of people resent us or envy us. And so we're proud and maybe a little bit afraid of people. Maybe we protect ourselves too much.

I see what you, he said, although he didn't at all.

One evening, after a reception at the British Embassy, we managed to elude our minders and ended up in a restaurant where a large party of Romanians at a neighbouring table were singing national songs: ‘Melvyn [Bragg] insisted we must counter so we belted out John Brown’s Body, Tipperary, etc. until the Romanians announced themselves defeated and departed with much flashing of teeth and hand-shaking.’

At the other end of life, I look back at myself with surprise, and a certain impatience. How young . How - not innocent, but ignorant. And how judgmental I am being now, groomed by decades of newsprint, radio, television. We are indeed in, or of, the world, there’s no escaping it, why should there not be a time of prelapsarian freedom?

Memory is crucial, memory is everything, but to retreat there would be a fatal detachment.

Now, Joe Saul, that's better. The red is gone out of your eyes. You have the blackest eyes - like new split coal - that black! But you were angry, or very troubled.

If I was, I am not now, he said. Everything bad evaporates when I touch you. I love you, Mordeen - starvingly.

Then you are not satisfied?

No - never - I never am.

He strained her tight to him.
I get frightened, he said. My mind plays games. It whispers that you don’t exist. It sneers that you have gone away. It whines to me that there is no Mordeen. It’s a cruel, mischievous game.

Her words depressed him. They were like sugar sprinkled on the floor: no matter how much you sweep, you still feel it under your feet.

She'll have a fight with Ronald! How can a human never have peace! She kept her eyes on the plate of marmalade, as if weighing up all the possibilities.

-Perseverance to the end.
-What did you say, Grandpa?
-Perseverance to the end, that is the secret of victory, in both small and large battles.

You're much more difficult now, Charmian had observed on several occasions, than you were at menopause.

Why time takes away some people’s memory, others’ hearing? Why old people always talk about their youth or their will?

One of the few advantages of age is that you can report on it with a certain authority; you are a native now, and know what goes on here. That, and the backwards glance- the identifying freight of a lifetime.

🙂What a nice kick-off! Empowering even…