Speaking on StageSpeakers and presenters have only a few short seconds before their audience members begin forming opinions. True professionals know that beginning with impact determines audience engagement, the energy in the room, positive feedback, the quality of the experience, and whether or not their performance will be a success. A few of the popular methods which you can use to break the ice from the stage are:• Using music.• Using quotes.• Telling a joke.• Citing statistics.• Showing a video.• Asking questions.• Stating a problem.• Sharing acronyms.• Sharing a personal story.• Laying down a challenge.• Using analogies and comparisons.• Taking surveys; raise your hand if . . . Once you refine, define, and discover great conversation starters, you will enjoy renewed confidence for communicating well with new people.

Her mind moved around and around the subject, moving with a kind of fuzzy firmness. With no coherent thought process, she arrived at a conviction - a habit with the basically insecure; an insecurity whose seeds are invariably planted earlier, in under or over-protectiveness, in a distrust in parental authority which becomes all authority. It can later, with maturity - a flexible concept - be laughed away, dispelled by determined clear thinking. Or it can be encouraged by self-abusive resentment and brooding self-pity. It can grow ever greater until the original authority becomes intolerable, and a change becomes imperative. Not to a radical one in thinking; that would be too troublesome, too painful. The change is simply to authority in another guise which, in time, and under any great stress, must be distrusted and resented even more than the first.

What determines our brotherhood is what that man is by reason of Christ. Our community with one another consists solely in what Christ has done to both of us. This is true not merely at the beginning, as though in the course of time something else were to be added to our community; it remains so for all the future and to all eternity. I have community with others and I shall continue to have it only through Jesus Christ. The more genuine and the deeper our community becomes, the more will everything else between us recede, the more clearly and purely will Jesus Christ and his work become the one and only thing that is vital between us. We have one another only through Christ, but through Christ we do have one another, wholly, for eternity.

I suppose I knew on an intellectual level that graves weren't especially made for getting out of. I mean, you start with a hermetically sealed casket and then you dump six feet of dirt on top of it. Over time the earth gets compacted, which can't make it easy to dig through. So even if you're a very angry and determined zombie, you've kind of got your work cut out for you just escaping from the grave.Which was, I suppose, why we got hit with an initial wave of zombie bugs, birds and rodents. I bet some people would say if you've never picked undead mosquitoes out of your teeth, you've never lived. Under that definition, I'd be just as happy to have not lived, thanks.

I want to fall asleep next to you every night even when you’re cranky. I want to wake up next to you every morning even when I’m grumpy. I love the fact that when you snore it sounds a little like your wolf. I love that your mind is just as scheming as mine. I love the tiny smile you show only me after we’ve made love. I love the compassion you show to your subjects when other Rulers wouldn’t, but at the same time your intelligence and determination when you know you can’t. I love how loyal you are to those you love. And when it’s time to have children, you’re the one I want to have them with.

Without a word he started stalking down the street in the opposite direction my grandparents had taken. I started after him, my steps slower.And then quite abruptly Caine whipped around and marched back toward me. Features etched with determination, he yanked me roughly to him and crushed his mouth down over mine. I made a noise of surprise in the back of my throat before my instincts took over. I couldn’t help sinking into his kiss.When he finally let me go we were both breathing hard. Caine smoothed his thumb over my cheek, his eyes still dark with passion and anger. “I could give a fuck who saw that.

And I would tell him, so full of twentysomething wisdom, that life is almost never about choosing between one thing you really want and another thing you don't want at all. If you're lucky, and healthy, and live in a country where you have enough to eat and no fear that you're going to get shot when you walk out your door, life is an endless series of choosing between two things you want almost equally. And you have to evaluate and determine which awesome thing you want infinitesimally more, and then give up that other awesome thing you want almost exactly as much. You have to trade awesome for awesome. Everyone I knew, no matter what they chose, was at least a little in mourning for that other thing.

“Matter without any apparent life, i.e. abiotic matter, also supports our sustenance. Without Jupiter and Saturn orbiting out past Earth, life may not have been able to gain a foothold on our planet. The two gas giants likely helped stabilize the solar system, protecting Earth and the other interior, rocky planets from frequent run-ins with big, fast-moving objects. Sun and moon give us light and their pre-determined movements make our days and night liveable in terms of length and temperature. Due to the Sun and Moon’s gravitational pull, we have tides. Seas and rivers give us food and water. Likewise, forests, life in forests, mountains and bio-diversity together provide the ecological balance which helps in sustaining life.”

“I’ve come to think that flourishing consists of putting yourself in situations in which you lose self-consciousness and become fused with other people, experiences, or tasks. It happens sometimes when you are lost in a hard challenge, or when an artist or a craftsman becomes one with the brush or the tool. It happens sometimes while you’re playing sports, or listening to music or lost in a story, or to some people when they feel enveloped by God’s love. And it happens most when we connect with other people. I’ve come to think that happiness isn’t really produced by conscious accomplishments. Happiness is a measure of how thickly the unconscious parts of our minds are intertwined with other people and with activities. Happiness is determined by how much information and affection flows through us covertly every day and year.”

“Poetry can unleash a terrible fear. I suppose it is the fear of possibilities, too many possibilities, each with its own endless set of variations. It's like looking too closely and too long into a mirror; soon your features distort, then erupt. You look too closely into your poems, or listen too closely to them as they arrive in whispers, and the features inside you - call it heart, call it mind, call it soul - accelerate out of control. They distort and they erupt, and it is one strange pain. You realize, then, that you can't attempt breaking down too many barriers in too short a time, because there are as many horrors waiting to get in at you as there are parts of yourself pushing to break out, and with the same, or more, fevered determination.”