What we link to pleasure and what we link to pain determines our destiny.
In terms of foods for me, I think I have more of the usual associations - foods from childhood that I associate with care and love, from relatives or special restaurants like the kind elderly man who dusted seasoning salt on French fries at the corner burger joint.
What? I'm not ashamed to admit that random things remind me of Harry Potter.
37 is a lumpy number, a bit like porridge. Six is very small and dark and cold, and whenever I was little trying to understand what sadness is I would imagine myself inside a number six and having that experience of cold and darkness. Similarly, number four is a shy number.
You, and you alone, decide what something means to you. Yet this is a decision that most people make based upon past feelings, experiences, understandings, or future fears. None of this has anything to do with what is going on right here, right now.
If there's anything you want to do and you can't figure out why you're not doing it, there's a simple answer: you link more pain to doing it than not doing it. Hey, if you don't have enough money, for example I know that's an issue for a lot of people. It was for a good deal of my life. If you don't have money there's only one reason: you link more pain to having more money than to not having it.
Our memories, they can be inviting. But some are altogether, mighty frightening.
There are women named Faith, Hope, Joy, and Prudence. Why not Despair, Guilt, Rage, and Grief? It seems only right. 'Tom, I'd like you to meet the girl of my dreams, Tragedy.' These days, Trajedi.
Everyone knows that yellow, orange, and red suggest ideas of joy and plenty. I can paint you the skin of Venus with mud, provided you let me surround it as I will.
My mother is convinced that yellow is a happy color and that a happy girl would get a husband. -Penelope Featherington
Everything you say in a family carries meaning from all that was said before. So with friends, there is less likelihood of a few words triggering associations from childhood, where our deepest emotions often are rooted.
Colour is, on the evidence of language alone, very bound up with the feelings.
Each of us has a network of emotional and logical associations that is unique to us. Activate one mode of the association, and you activate a predictable pattern of behavior. A situation isn't just the external events that take place; it is how each individual processes those events and integrates them into her thoughts and feelings.
There is no man who has not some interesting associations with particular scenes, or airs, or books, and who does not feel their beauty or sublimity enhanced to him by such connections.
Some people hate lime-green; red has all this emotional baggage. Blue seems to be overall one of the more positive colors, and a little more serious than yellow.
Why is summer mist romantic and autumn mist just sad?
I have a very strong color theory, for instance, where in 'Powers,' green means powerless, and red means power.The story was all there, but I was desperate to make sure that extra level was the case.
Memory was that woman on the train. Insane in the way she sifted through dark things in a closet and emerged with the most unlikely ones - a fleeting look, a feeling. The smell of smoke. A windscreen wiper. A mother's marble eyes. Quite sane in the way she left huge tracts of darkness veiled. Unremembered.
The lover never sees personal resemblances in his mistress to her kindred or to others. His friends find in her a likeness to hermother, or her sisters, or to persons not of her blood. The lover sees no resemblance except to summer evenings and diamond mornings, to rainbows and the song of birds.
He was consious of a thousand odours floating in the air, each one connected with a thousand thoughts, and hopes, and joys, and cares, long, long, forgotten.
I think pink is one of the saddest colors in the world, and many American humans are taught not to take anything pink seriously, which is weird.
I was an overweight kid, and my father struggled with his weight, too. We would go for a ride on his motorcycle on Sunday morning to get doughnuts, to make pizza together, or go get ice cream. I quickly learned that food equalled love and attention.
Our native susceptibilities and acquired tastes determine which of the many qualities in an object shall most impress us, and be most clearly recalled. One man remembers the combustible properties of a substance, which to another is memorable for its polarising property; to one man a stream is so much water-power, to another a rendezvous for lovers.
I find C major to be the key of strength, but also the key of regret. E major is the key of confidence. A-flat major is the key of renunciation.
Associations are both subtle and powerful.
