This quote, and the whole story about the battle between the two wolves within everyone, speaks volumes to me. At the risk of getting too personal, I'll talk about a conversation I recently had with a good friend: in a nutshell, we were talking on the phone about our first several weeks in college (he goes to Alabama) and he made a comment about how I've been sounding a little bit full of myself. "This has kind of been an ongoing thing, Sam," he said. "You've really been starting to sound arrogant and not like the friend I know." At the time I was quite taken aback by what he'd said, but after reading this quote I took a moment to reflect on how I've been acting since I got to UT. And my friend was right; recently I have been feeding the Evil Wolf. Time to change that.
2) "Communication by speech is virtually always accompanied by hand movements, facial expressions, and bodily gestures. They provide the visual nuances that amplify, qualify, and modify our utterances. They ground our communication in a spatial and temporal gestalt and help others interpret what we really mean and are as important as tone and inflection in conveying intent" (260).
I immediately thought of digital communication when I read this. It's extremely common for misunderstandings to occur via email and text just because of all the face-to-face interaction that's lacking over such mediums. I also think it's incredibly interesting, and accurate, that speech evolved from hand gestures and other body language.
3) "The very thing that gives you pleasure today will give you pain tomorrow, or it will leave you, so its absence will give you pain. And what is often referred to as love may be pleasurable and exciting for a while, but it is an addictive clinging, an extremely needy condition that can turn into its opposite at the flick of a switch. Many "love" relationships, after the initial euphoria has passed, actually oscillate between "love" and hate, attraction and attack" (290).
Sorry, getting personal again here: recently splitting up with my girlfriend of four years, I know exactly what this quote is talking about. Our relationship had a ton of "euphoria" going on at first, but after several years, those feelings slowly went away. And while I certainly never felt hate for my girlfriend towards the end of our relationship, there certainly was a noticeable "oscillation" between our being attracted to each other, then our being sick, tired, and annoyed with each other. I guess in this sense, even though we "loved" each other, it never really was "real love" or "real joy" (pretty depressing to think about).
