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We often say yes to little requests because we are not clear enough about what we need to be doing instead. When your dreams are vague, it’s easy to rationalize little exceptions all day long and ever get around to the specific things you need to do to succeed.

-Cedric, soy una mujer muy idiota y acabo de entenderlo.
-Por suerte, la mayoría de nosotros no sufrimos tanto al darnos cuenta de nuestras idioteces. ¡Pobre tía Emily!

Como diría el kiddo de 7: “ay ay ay”. Tiempo sin leer y de pronto, entre Darth Vader, Batman y fans de Star Trek, que me topo con este libro en la sección de “Spanish”. 😍 bello reencuentro con la lectura.

It was meant to be something of a game, I think, the way a spelling bee is a game, but you could see a subtle sorting going on and a knowing slump of humiliation in the kids who didn’t make it past “red.” This, of course, was 1969, in a public school on the South Side of Chicago. Nobody was talking about self-esteem or growth mind-sets. If you’d had a head start at home, you were rewarded for it at school (...)

"Confronting fear is the destiny of a Jedi," Luke went on. "Your destiny. If you don't face Palpatine, it will mean the end to the Jedi. And the war will be lost."

"Confronting fear is the destiny of a Jedi," Luke went on. "Your destiny. If you don't face Palpatine, it will mean the end to the Jedi. And the war will be lost."

"Leia says when something's trying to hurt you, it was usually hurt by something bigger."

Finally, Leia said, “never be afraid of who you are.”
Rey's eyes flew open. Leia's voice was filled with power. With finality. Maybe the Force had shown her something. Or maybe it was just damn good advice.


---beeeeep.

The girl had darkness inside her comment just like Ben. But Lea could not make the same mistake she had the with her son. She could not give in to the fear —neither of the darkness rising within her pupil nor of her own questionable qualifications as a teacher. Most important, she would never sen Rey away

“My face. It doesn’t matter,” I said. “God has given me a new life.” My recovery was a blessing, a gift from God and from all the people who had cared for me and prayed for me. And I was at peace. But while I was in Birmingham watching Shrek and his talking donkey, my poor parents had been thousands of miles away, enduring their own terrible pain. I had been healing while they had been suffering.

When she walked me back to my bed, I looked at my parents. “It’s my face,” I said. “And I accept it. Now,” I said gently, “you must accept it, too.” There was so much more I wanted to say to them. I had had time to get used to my new face. But it was a shock to them. I wanted them to know I didn’t care how I looked.

But he didn’t raise his voice or scold me. He knew I was being so hard on myself already that he had no need to reprimand me. Instead, he consoled me by telling me about the mistakes great heroes had made when they were children. (...) . He relayed a saying from a story his father used to tell him: “A child is a child when he’s a child, even if he’s a prophet.”

“Jessica, girl, I wish I could stand in your place and take your sufferings. But each of us must make her own path.”

Alma tendría muchos años por delante para desmenuzar concienzudamente sus actos de 1955. Ese año aterrizó en la realidad y fueron inútiles sus maniobras para atenuar la vergüenza insuperable que la agobiaba, vergüenza por la estupidez de quedar preñada, por amar a Ichimei menos que a sí misma, por su terror a la pobreza, por ceder a la presión social y a los prejuicios de raza, por aceptar el sacrificio de Nathaniel,

"la edad, por sí sola, no hace a nadie mejor ni más sabio, sólo acentúa lo que cada uno ha sido siempre."

performing. If they don’t excel, they might not receive the love and acceptance they need from you, the parent. How kind is that? So they funnel all their energy into succeeding, which might produce perfect grades but does nothing for their independence and sense of empowerment, let alone their kindness toward others.

You are the best model possible for your child. Why? Because the process of change is an incredibly powerful lesson. A child can’t learn this from a parent who’s perfect all the time (& of course no parent is), and they won’t learn it from a parent who repeats the same bad behavior over and over again. Consider yourself lucky: You have a golden opportunity. You can teach your child how to become a better person(...)

And then there’s anxiety and insecurity, some of the most debilitating behaviors we can model for our children, and unfortunately some of the most common.

We worry our child won’t succeed because of our own deficiencies; we hover because we’re afraid we’ve made a mistake.

So why do we insist on dictating? Why are we so controlling? Aren’t we trying to teach our children to function in a democratic society, to be able to live and work with others? The answer is we forget how important it is to let them practice having control, but that’s what we have to do as parents, for the health of our children and the whole family.

Sometimes, though, despite all our tenacity and courage, grit means knowing when to quit. Grittiness is needed even when it’s time to back down gracefully. It’s the skill that gives us the strength to make a change.

and it won't be wine and roses from now until the end but it will never, it will never be that dark again.

The world was then full of disease germs, as today it is full of carcinogens. But man did not put the germs into the environment and his role in spreading them was involuntary. In contrast, man has put the vast majority of carcinogens into the environment, and he can, if he wishes, eliminate many of them.

For each of us, as for the robin in Michigan or the salmon in the Miramichi, this is a problem of ecology, of interrelationships, of interdependence. (...)We spray our elms and the following springs are silent of robin song, not because we sprayed the robins directly but because the poison traveled, step by step, through the now familiar elm leaf-earthworm-robin cycle.

There are ways to solve this problem—to preserve the forests and to save the fishes, too. To assume that we must resign ourselves to turning our waterways into rivers of death is to follow the counsel of despair and defeatism.

The resort to weapons such as insecticides to control it is a proof of insufficient knowledge and of an incapacity so to guide the processes of nature that brute force becomes unnecessary. Humbleness is in order; there is no excuse for scientific conceit here.

Aldrin is a somewhat mysterious substance, for although it exists as a separate entity it bears the relation of alter ego to dieldrin. When carrots are taken from a bed treated with aldrin they are found to contain residues of dieldrin. This change occurs in living tissues and also in soil. Such (...) transformations have led to many erroneous reports (...) The residues are there, but they are dieldrin (...)

When we support curiosity, what we’re really developing is a child’s imagination. Which brings me to creativity, a wonderful by-product of independence and curiosity.

(...) Other families are pursuing their own solutions including homeschooling, which has grown in popularity (...) Why? because the parents had negative experiences in school themselves and are looking for a better alternative for their children.

I stood there attempting to absorb the absurd truth of the punch line uttered by Ernest. Come on, you, I said to the mirror, one that had fallen from a compact with the gilt peeling away, one easily conjured. come on, I said to one eye and then to the wandering other, get focused. you got to get a grip on the whole picture. the mirror slipped from my hand (...)

this is what I know. sam is dead. my brother is dead. my mother is dead. my father is dead. my husband is dead. my cat is dead. & my dog who was dead in '57 is still dead. yet still I keep thinking that something wonderful is about to happen. maybe tomorrow. a tomorrow following a whole succession of tomorrows. but getting back to the moment, which is already gone, I was alone (...) suddenly left holding the bag.