All Quotes By Tag: Nonfiction
“Everything outer in the world has an inner cause and every change we want in the outer world can only be truly effective and lasting if driven from within.”
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“This is not a conventional “how-to” book. It contains no exercises, and it has few formulas saying “first do this, then do that.” This is intentional. As we’ll see later, eros doesn’t like to be told what to do. If you set a goal, your sexual mind will be happy to reject it. It’s kind of childish and brilliant that way. You also won’t find much about sexual biology or neurochemistry on these pages. Sex books these days tend to be full of advice for “boosting your dopamine”—or your oxytocin, or some other such nonsense. In all my 30 years as a sex therapist, I’ve yet to see a dopamine molecule walk into my office. We’ll stick with things you can see and feel yourself, without needing a laboratory. I’ll also spare you the body diagrams. You already know what a penis and vagina look like, right? And we won’t discuss how many neurons are concentrated in your clitoris. It’s an impressive number, but who really cares? There are a few great sex books already out there, and I’ll point them out to you as we go along. But reading most of the others is like gnawing on dry bones. As my friend and colleague Paul Joannides, the author of Guide to Getting it On (one of the aforementioned great ones), has accurately noted, “the trouble with most books on sex is they don’t get anyone hard or wet.” This book is not intended to get you hard or wet. But it’s meant not to get in your way either. The chapters are short, so you can read them even if you get a little distracted. Hey, I hope you get a little distracted. There are no lists to memorize, and there won’t be a test afterwards. We’re dealing with a part of the human mind that hasn’t gone to school yet, and never will. Any questions? OK, let’s get started . . .Adapted from LOVE WORTH MAKING by Stephen Snyder, M.D. Copyright © 2018 by the author and reprinted with permission of St. Martin’s Press, LLC.”
“The foundation of adult trust is not “You will never hurt me.” It is “I trust myself with whatever you do.”
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“It is usually unbearably painful to read a book by an author who knows way less than you do, unless the book is a novel.”
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“From kindergarten to the valedictory address, schools grade, rank, and label their best performers. The top high school student wins the first major life contest, a competition in which most members of society participate. Following high school, victors enter subsequent contests at an advantage. The race is never restarted.”
“To be number one is to be publicly labeled a winner in the system that counts – a system of advancement through personal merit and effort in rugged competition. Labels of success – Rhodes scholar, Nobel laureate, Heisman Trophy winner – follow a person through life and define him or her to the public. One such label, valedictorian, marks academic winners. Schools in the United States have at least one common belief: high academic achievement is a good thing.”
“Male valedictorians attended Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT, and Stanford. Only one woman chose an Ivy League university-Cornell.”
“Women—and only women—lowered their intellectual self-esteem between high school graduation and sophomore year of college.”
“Outstanding students of color arrived on campus without the web of white middle-class family and school structures that provided Anglo students with practical knowledge in such areas as college choice strategies and career planning.”
“For minority students, as for women and working-class white valedictorians, superior college grades did not lead smoothly to high-level satisfying work.”
“One of the problems with having time to read all that you want is that your interests become so eclectic it’s hard to focus.”
“As valedictorians matured from high school they began to change their views of success from stereotypical ideals such as material wealth or emulating their parents’ lifestyle to an idea created on their own. They now sought balance between money, career and family as opposed to, say, only wealth. Academically and careerwise most of them were traditionally successful.”
“Are valedictorians successful a decade and a half after high school? Yes is the simple answer to this straightforward question…Yet the answer becomes infinitely less simple when we examine what society and the valedictorians themselves mean by “success.”
“Are schools rewarding the right people as the highest achievers? If the goal is hard-working, productive, adaptable adults, then U.S. high schools are recognizing precisely the correct group.”
“Just as the stereotypes of the one-sided academic grind or the obsessed genius are myths for high school valedictorians, also false is the conception of academic achievers as troubled individuals effective only in school.”