Love like a dog.As long as it’s been treated with kindness and respect a dog will love you. A dog doesn’t care about your age, sex, gender identity, orientation, religion, race or socioeconomic bracket. A dog doesn’t care if you’re skinny, have stretch marks or scars. A dog doesn’t care how many people you’ve slept with, what hardships you’ve had to overcome; and if you’re crying a dog will come put its little chin on your chest and love you regardless. A dog doesn’t let these things dictate to whom or how much it extends its heart. A dog just loves.Love like a dog.A dog never tries to play it cool, hard to get or shies away from showing how much it loves. A dog’s composure is never betrayed by its tail because it freely and without hesitation shows how ecstatic it is to see you every time you walk through the door. When a dog is around other dogs it doesn’t pretend that it doesn’t really love tennis balls. A dog loves what it loves and is never embarrassed about showing how it feels.Love like a dog.A dog is loyal to and would fiercely defend those whom it loves. “For the strength of the pack is the wolf, and the strength of the wolf is the pack.” Life is not always easy. At times you will have to be brave. At times you will be hurt. But a dog will never leave you. Stay close. Be faithful. Protect your pack.Love like a dog.That is my advice to you. Love like a dog.

Yawn...I believe that I love sleepmuch more than anybody I’ve evermet.I have the ability to sleep for2 or 3 days andnights.I will go to bed at any givenmoment.I often confused my girlfriendsthis way—say it would be about onethirtyin the afternoon:“well, I’m going to bed now, I’mgoing to sleep…”most of them wouldn’t mind, theywould go to bed with methinking I was hinting forsexbut I would just turn my backand snore off.this, of course, could explainwhy so many of my girlfriendsleft me.as for doctors, they were neverany help:“listen, I have this desire togo to bed and sleep, almost allthe time.what is wrong withme?”“do you get enough exercise?”“yes…”“are you getting enoughnourishment?”“yes…”they always handed me aprescriptionwhich I threw awaybetween the office and theparking lot.it’s a curious maladybecause I can’t sleep between6 p.m. and midnight.it must occur aftermidnightand when I ariseit can never bebefore noon.and should the phone ringsay at 10:30 a.m.I go into a mad ragedon’t even ask who the callerisscream into thephone: “WHAT ARE YOUCALLING ME FOR AT THISHOUR!”hangup…every person, I suppose, hastheir eccentricitiesbut in an effort to benormalin the world’seyethey overcome themand thereforedestroy theirspecial calling.I’ve kept mineand do believe thatthey have lent generously tomy existence.I think it’s the main reason Idecided to become awriter: I can typeanytime andsleepwhen I damn wellplease.

Then her brain caught up with her body and a trickle of uncertainty slid through her. She stilled, heart pounding, body aching with the most intense desire she’d ever known. Nathan stopped and raised his head to look down at her, his hand still cupping her breast. He was breathing as hard as she was, his eyes glittering with a hunger so raw it sliced her inside. When she didn’t say anything he started to remove his hand but she tightened her grip and held him there as she gazed into his eyes. “I can’t be just another notch on your belt, Nathan,” she whispered in an agonized voice. Not with him, it would crush her. If that’s all she was to him, she would rather stop things here than continue. She’d already battled long and hard to overcome feeling cheap and used. She wouldn’t do it again for any man, not even Nathan. The anguished look on his face made her feel terrible for saying it, but she’d had to make it clear. “No,” he insisted, leaning down to rest his forehead against hers and closing his eyes. She could feel the urgency in him, the way it strung his muscles tight, the fingers in her hair sliding open to cradle the back of her skull. The protective, possessive gesture made her melt and lean into his hold. “No, you’re not, I swear to God you’re not.

“Had I been less firmly resolved upon settling down definitively to work, I should perhaps have made an effort to begin at once. But since my resolution was explicit, since within twenty-four hours, in the empty frame of the following day where everything was so well-arranged because I myself was not yet in it, my good intention would be realized without difficulty, it was better not to start on an evening when I felt ill-prepared. The following days were not, alas, to prove more propitious. But I was reasonable. It would have been puerile, on the part of one who had waited now for years, not to put up with a postponement of two or three days. Confident that by the day after tomorrow I should have written several pages, I said not a word more to my parents of my decision; I preferred to remain patient and then to bring to a convinced and comforted grandmother a sample of work that was already under way. Unfortunately the next day was not that vast, extraneous expanse of time to which I had feverishly looked forward. When it drew to a close, my laziness and my painful struggle to overcome certain internal obstacles had simply lasted twenty-four hours longer. And at the end of several days, my plans not having matured, I had no longer the same hope that they would be realized at once, and hence no longer the heart to subordinate everything else to their realization: I began once again to keep late hours...”

In the face of an obstacle which it is impossible to overcome, stubbornness is stupid. If I persist in beating my fist against a stone wall, my freedom exhausts itself in this useless gesture without succeeding in giving itself a content. It debases itself in a vain contingency. Yet, there is hardly a sadder virtue than resignation. It transforms into phantoms and contingent reveries projects which had at the beginning been set up as will and freedom. A young man has hoped for a happy or useful or glorious life. If the man he has become looks upon these miscarried attempts of his adolescence with disillusioned indifference, there they are, forever frozen in the dead past. When an effort fails, one declares bitterly that he has lost time and wasted his powers. The failure condemns that whole part of ourselves which we had engaged in the effort. It was to escape this dilemma that the Stoics preached indifference. We could indeed assert our freedom against all constraint if we agreed to renounce the particularity of our projects. If a door refuses to open, let us accept not opening it and there we are free. But by doing that, one manages only to save an abstract notion of freedom. It is emptied of all content and all truth. The power of man ceases to be limited because it is annulled. It is the particularity of the project which determines the limitation of the power, but it is also what gives the project its content and permits it to be set up. There are people who are filled with such horror at the idea of a defeat that they keep themselves from ever doing anything. But no one would dream of considering this gloomy passivity as the triumph of freedom

Come on, Princess," he called to the bench, and Carlotta bounced up. She was wide like the rest of them, but no man could fairly say she was too wide. The most that could be said was that she did not have much further to go before she would have to start squeezing it in and strapping it up, which she clearly did not do now. She let it hang where it was, and it did very nicely by itself. As she passed among the boys they looked her over with unconcealed envy, as though they knew she had something they didn't have but were not quite sure what it was. One thing was certain, she got more exercise than they did.The next to be noticed were her braids, they hung forward over her terrain, ignoring as much as possible her contours, like two shiny black meridianal lines demarking her longitudes as far down as the equator. It was not hard to imagine oneself spending a long lifetime on that bare little island alone, with no plan or ambition, too overcome with the heat to continue on south to the pole, far less return to the continents. Nothing productive could ever be accomplished there, but there would be comfort such as few men have known, there would be torpor. The body swelled with such thoughts, the mind shrank from them, and the longing eyes traveled finally up north, to where those meridians came together at a point above a bland white area vaguely charted, with few landmarks, no doubt sparsely inhabited. There the imagination halted.

“Even if it were possible to cast my horoscope in this one life, and to make an accurate prediction about my future, it would not be possible to 'show' it to me because as soon as I saw it my future would change by definition. This is why Werner Heisenberg's adaptation of the Hays Office—the so-called principle of uncertainty whereby the act of measuring something has the effect of altering the measurement—is of such importance. In my case the difference is often made by publicity. For example, and to boast of one of my few virtues, I used to derive pleasure from giving my time to bright young people who showed promise as writers and who asked for my help. Then some profile of me quoted someone who disclosed that I liked to do this. Then it became something widely said of me, whereupon it became almost impossible for me to go on doing it, because I started to receive far more requests than I could respond to, let alone satisfy. Perception modifies reality: when I abandoned the smoking habit of more than three decades I was given a supposedly helpful pill called Wellbutrin. But as soon as I discovered that this was the brand name for an antidepressant, I tossed the bottle away. There may be successful methods for overcoming the blues but for me they cannot include a capsule that says: 'Fool yourself into happiness, while pretending not to do so.' I should actually want my mind to be strong enough to circumvent such a trick.”

Bernstein was impressed by Sloan's thoughtfulness. Sloan seemed convinced that the President, whom he very much wanted to see re-elected, had known nothing of what happened before June 17; but he was as sure that Nixon had been ill-served by his surrogates before the bugging and had been put in increasing jeopardy by them ever since. Sloan believed that the prosecutors were honest men, determined to learn the truth, but there were obstacles they had been unable to overcome. He couldn't tell whether the FBI had been merely sloppy or under pressure to follow procedures that would impede an effective investigation. He believed the press was doing its job, but, in the absence of candor from the committee, it had reached unfair conclusions about some people. Sloan himself was a prime example. He was not bitter, just disillusioned. All he wanted now was to clean up his legal obligations - testimony in the trial and in the civil suit - and leave Washington forever. He was looking for a job in industry, a management position, but it was difficult. His name had been in the papers often. He would not work for the White House again even if asked to come back. He wished he were in Bernstein's place, wished he could write. Maybe then he could express what had been going through his mind. Not the cold, hard facts of Watergate necessarily - that wasn't really what was important. But what it was like for young men and women to come to Washington because they believed in something and then to be inside and see how things worked and watch their own ideals disintegrate.

I have come to realize that a person’s relationship with their career is no different than their relationship with their spouse. You wake up together. You go to sleep together. You live together. It is possible to stay in a relationship that is based on convenience, financial security, or necessity, as opposed to genuine passion or love. But chances are that if the relationship is not built on genuine passion and love, it will have some difficulty at some point in time. Chances are it will fall apart at some point in time. And even if you manage to make it work, it just doesn’t feel good every day to wake up and go to sleep with someone or something you are simply not passionate about.The other thing I have come to realize is perhaps even more important. They say that people are afraid to fail. The proverbial “they”. I don’t know who “they” are, but they say it… People are afraid to fail. Or so it goes. But I disagree. People may think they are afraid to fail. But they are not afraid of failure per se. They are actually only afraid that other people will see that they have failed. They are afraid of what other will think of their failure. People will take incredible chances when there is no risk of others witnessing their failure. It’s why people dance and sing in the shower. It is the fear of what others will think of their failure that leads to constraints. Despair. Even suicide. In my career, I have seen multiple friends and clients give up, I am certain, out of a perceived shame of what they must have thought others were thinking of their failures... But it is an objective, outright, and utterly useless hindrance. A hindrance to success. There is nothing constructive about it. It is a reflex to overcome.... Flukes aside, success requires total dedication.

Let there be light! Abba! Father, let there be light!In our dark moments we cry; let there be light!Light to show us the way; light to shine before all others!Light to see through darkness; light to change all staleness!Let there be light! Abba! Father, we cry, let there be light!Let there be light! Abba! Father, let there be light!The future is always truly uncertain; let there be light!Light to shine on the snares of darkness; light to take steps with calmness!Light for us to see our paths well; light for us to understand your ways well!Let there be light! Abba! Father, we cry, let there be light!Let there be light! Abba! Father, let there be light!We do not know who is coming in the darkness; let there be light!Light to blindfold the attacker; light to change the sinner!Light to give us power; light to make all things better!Let there be light! Abba! Father, we cry, let there be light!Let there be light! Abba! Father, let there be light!We need freedom to do your work; let there be light!Light to free us from bondage; light to escape attackers’ carnage!Light to lead us into your sonship; Light to empower our sonship!Let there be light! Abba! Father, we cry, let there be light!Let there be light! Abba Father, let there be light!We need your light to know the truth; let there be light!Light to enlighten our understanding; light to overcome misunderstanding!Light to withstand strongholds; light to empower our goals!Let there be light! Abba! Father, we cry, let there be light!