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20 Spine-Chilling Stories in Just Two Sentences
1. As I’m getting him ready for night, he says, “Daddy, look beneath my bed for monsters.” For his pleasure, I peek below the bed and see him, another him, tremblingly peering out at me while muttering, “Daddy, there’s somebody on my bed.”
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Reading Between The Lines: ‘Andor’
Lonni Jung: And what do you sacrifice?
Luthen Rael: Calm. Kindness, kinship. Love. I’ve given up all chance at inner peace, I’ve made my mind a sunless space. I share my dreams with ghosts. I wake up every day to an equation I wrote 15 years ago from which there’s only one conclusion: I’m damned for what I do. My anger, my ego, my unwillingness to yield, my eagerness to fight, they’ve set me on a path from which there is no escape. I yearned to be a savior against injustice without contemplating the cost, and by the time I looked down, there was no longer any ground beneath my feet.
What is… what is my sacrifice? I’m condemned to use the tools of my enemy to defeat them. I burn my decency for someone else’s future. I burn my life, to make a sunrise that I know I’ll never see. No, the ego that started this fight will never have a mirror, or an audience, or the light of gratitude. So what do I sacrifice?
Everything.
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The Backstories And History Of 10 Famous Paintings
Gustav Klimt (1862-1918): Death and Life, 1910, reworked in 1915, oil on canvas, Leopold Museum, Vienna
Gustav Klimt’s large painting ‘Death and Life’, created in 1910, features not a personal death but rather merely an allegorical Grim Reaper who gazes at “life” with a malicious grin.
This “life” is comprised of all generations: every age group is represented, from the baby to the grandmother, in this depiction of the never-ending circle of life.
Death may be able to swipe individuals from life, but life itself, humanity as a whole, will always elude his grasp. The circle of life likewise repeats itself in the diverse, wonderful, pastel-coloured circular ornaments which adorn life like a garland.
Gustav Klimt described this painting, which was honoured with a first prize at the 1911 International Art Exhibition in Rome, as his most important figurative work. Even so, he seems to suddenly no longer have been satisfied with this version in 1915, for he then began making changes to the painting—which had been framed for long by that time.
The background, reportedly once gold-coloured, was made grey, and both death and life were given further ornaments. Standing before the original and examining the left interior edge of Josef Hoffmann’s frame for the painting, one can still discern traces of the subsequent over-painting, which was done by Klimt himself.
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Reading Between The Lines – ‘The Bell Jar’
“I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart: I am, I am, I am.”
— Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
This quote is from Sylvia Plath’s novel “The Bell Jar,” which was published in 1963 under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. The novel is semi-autobiographical, blending elements of Plath’s own life and experiences with the fictional journey of the protagonist, Esther Greenwood. “The Bell Jar” is often hailed for its candid exploration of mental illness, identity, and the societal pressures on women in the 1950s.
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33 Design Fails That Destroy Common Sense
A Collection Of Useful Advice To Help You On Your Travels Through Life
Asking “How are you feeling?” is a much more open-ended question that’s not as accusatory or intimidating as “What’s wrong?”
When you ask someone “what’s wrong?” it puts them in a position that doesn’t encourage conversation or doesn’t encourage honesty. It gives them an easy way to say “Nothing” or to shrug you off.
Meanwhile, asking someone “how are you feeling?” will be much more open-ended, is more welcoming, caring and much more likely to lead to an honest answer.
This is especially true in relationships when your S/O is withholding why they’re upset or the fact of whether or not they’re actually upset.
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Reading Between The Lines – ‘The Road’
“You have to carry the fire.”
I don’t know how to.”
Yes, you do.”
Is the fire real? The fire?”
Yes it is.”
Where is it? I don’t know where it is.”
Yes you do. It’s inside you. It always was there. I can see it.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road
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Reading Between The Lines – ‘Norwegian Wood’
“Only much later did the flirefly take to the air. As if some thought had suddenly come to it, the firefly spread its wings, and in a moment it had flown past the handrail to float in the pale darkness. It traced a swift arc by the side of the water tank as if trying to bring back a lost interval in time. And then, after hovering there for a few seconds as if to watch its curved line of light blend into the wind, it finally flew off to the east.
Long after the firefly had disappeared, the trail of its light remained inside me, its pale, faint glow hovering on and on in the thick darkness behind my eyelids like a lost soul.
More than once I tried stretching my hand out in that darkness. My fingers touched nothing. The faint glow remained, just beyond there grasp.”
― Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood
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Reading Between The Lines – ‘Blood Meridian’
“A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained wedding veil and some in headgear or cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses’ ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse’s whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen’s faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West
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