A Quote by Deborah Tannen
Conversations with sisters can spark extremes of anger or extremes of love. Everything said between sisters carries meaning not only from what was just said but from all the conversations that came before - and 'before' can span a lifetime. The layers of meaning combine profound connection with equally profound competition.
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That extremes beget extremes is an apothegm built on the most profound observation of the human mind.
Everything you say in a family carries meaning from all that was said before. So with friends, there is less likelihood of a few words triggering associations from childhood, where our deepest emotions often are rooted.
So what is the difference between "power thinking" and "positive" thinking? The distinction is slight but profound. To me, people use positive thinking to pretend that everything is rosy, when they really believe that it's not. With power thinking, we understand that everything is neutral, that nothing has meaning except for the meaning we give it, and that we are going to make up a story and give something it's meaning.
The theme of sisters - of missing sisters, of needing sisters, the special love that sisters share or the antagonism sisters share - is something that is very close to me.
The story of the Fall always fascinates me as a play ground, but I cannot find any profound meaning in it, because of my 'liberal' view of human nature: I cannot believe in a state of original innocence, still less in a profound meaning in it, and I am always minimising the conception and the extent of Sin and the sinfulness of sex.
Grandmother pointed out my brother Perry, my sister Sarah, and my sister Eliza, who stood in the group. I had never seen my brother nor my sisters before; and, though I had sometimes heard of them, and felt a curious interest in them, I really did not understand what they were to me, or I to them. We were brothers and sisters, but what of that? Why should they be attached to me, or I to them? Brothers and sisters were by blood; but slavery had made us strangers. I heard the words brother and sisters, and knew they must mean something; but slavery had robbed these terms of their true meaning.
Our generation delimited the definition & horizon of Love in a box that mainly refers to love between a boy & a girl. Love has a broader & profound meaning beyond this box. Surely, the highest state of love is Love of God, a love between creations & the Creator.
There is a profound difference between information and meaning.
I scowled defensively. "My conversations don't usually include the subject of erections." "Too bad," he said. "All the best conversations do.
"I seek the meaning of existence," said the stranger. "You are of course assuming," said the Master, "that existence has a meaning." "Doesn't it?" "When you experience existence as it is - not as you think it is you will discover that your question has no meaning," said the Master.
But there's the rub. The present can never deliver one thing: meaning. The way of happiness and meaning are not the same. To find happiness, a man need only live in the moment; he need only live for the moment. But if he wants meaning--the meaning of his dreams, his secrets, his life--a man must reinhabit his past, however dark, and live for the future, however uncertain. Thus nature dangles happiness and meaning before us all, insisting only that we choose between them.
The energy that New York exudes is as much the light of extinguished souls as it is the spark of individual enterprise. And while the full meaning of the city may prove elusive, all New Yorkers are painfully aware that it remains an intractable mass of contradictions. It is not just the extremes of wealth and poverty living side by side.
I love the Bronte sisters, but I feel a closer kinship to the Ephron sisters, Nora and Delia, if only because their work makes me laugh more than the Brontes. I also love the Mitford sisters with their secret language and their endless letters back and forth.
I have four sisters, three younger sisters, so I've been an older sibling to people before.
Maybe every couple lived in the gaps between conversations, unable to say the important things for fear they had already been said, or couldn't be said; maybe every relationship started over every time two people came together.
Like a physically beautiful but otherwise rather dull person who trades on his or her looks, Southern California swings perpetually between a profound inferiority complex and an equally profound sense of entitlement.
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