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Quote by Melissa Albert

“Let's say your the girl who saved your best friends life. The person who apparently kept her alive With your love and your constancey. With your steadfast disregard for the worser parts of her nature. Like the way she had, of acting like she and you were the last real people on earth. Then let's say she changed over night. Became elusive, Unpredictable. Treated your love like it was a cage Untill you hit your limit And canceled your constancy. Held your love in reserve. saw her for what she was, and let her know it too. What happens then? What becomes of her life? when your sick of saving it.”

Quote by Melissa Albert

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The Bad Ones

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Melissa Albert

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“It happens like this: Something fantastic happens, and you pick up the phone to tell The Competitor. They applaud you momentarily and then they remind you of something they did that was similar, but at a higher level. Every single time. They're so used to doing it that they don't even realize it, and you start telling them your good news less and less. If you tell them that you just got a new job, they'll tell you they've been promoted to Topflight Job Haver of the World. If you say you got an A on your paper, they'll retort that their paper was considered the best in the class. Their superpower is being able to make any good news you have into something about them, and you will eventually realize that they really do not wish you well. Your joy is an ever-present reminder of their failures, and nobody needs that in their life.”

“In the early twentieth century, the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski ventured to the Trobriand Islands, part of present-day Papau New Guinea, in order to study the region's practice of gift exchange. People of the islands would travel great distances to offer one another symbolic, seemingly worthless necklaces and armbands. Malinowski believed he was observing a kind of soft power. Gift exchange was not a form of altruism, since there was the expectation of reciprocity. And it wasn't random, since the flow of gifts followed discernible patterns. Instead, he argued that this act of giving and receiving bound everyone in a political process. The expansion of these exchanges across the islands represented an expansion of political authority. The sociologist Marcel Mauss found Malinowski's explanation insufficient. He felt that Malinowski placed too much emphasis on transaction, rather than how feelings of indebtedness actually work. In 1923, he published "Essay on the Gift," which placed Malinowski's island networks in conversation with gifting practices in other societies, like indigenous traditions in the Americas, systems of communal ownership in China. Mauss introduced the idea of delayed reciprocity. You give expecting to receive. Yet we often give and receive according to intermittent, sometimes random intervals. That time lag is where a relationship emerges. Perhaps gifts serve political ends. But Mauss believed that they strengthened the bonds between people and communities. Your obligation isn't just to repay the gift according to a one-to-one ratio. You're beholden to the "spirit of the gift", a kind of shared faith. Every gesture carries a desire for connection, expanding one's ring of associations.”