Wishbone

“ For a woman to see an old dilapidated one, means poverty and disagreeableness for her.
Knee.
To dream that your knees are too large, denotes sudden ill luck for you.
If they are stiff and pain you, swift and fearful calamity awaits you.
For a woman to dream that she has well-formed and smooth knees, predicts she will have many admirers, but none to woo her in wedlock.
If they are soiled, sickness from dissipation is portended. If they are unshapely, unhappy changes in her fortune will displace ardent hopes.
To dream of knees is an unfortunate omen. ”

“ Be not surprised and alarmed that now has appeared of a sudden, What thou hast wished for so long. It is true that the present appearance Bears not the form of the wish, exactly as thou hadst conceived it: For our wishes oft hide from ourselves the object we wish for; Gifts come down from above in the shapes appointed by Heaven. Therefore misjudge not the maiden who now of thy dearly beloved, Good and intelligent son has been first to touch the affections: Happy to whom at once his first love's hand shall be given, And in whose heart no tenderest wish must secretly languish. ”

“ ENDOCRINE CHARGING OF WISHES It is the distinction of modern psychology that it has established the wish (craving, need, desire, libido) as the moving force in any psychic process. The position of the wish in psychology as the force within and behind the instinct may be compared to that of energy in physics, when it was elevated to a central position in the explanation of physical processes in the nineteenth century. The concept of the charged wish has illuminated all the hidden recesses and rendered audible all the subdued murmurings of the mind. ”

“ The head needs the foot, and the heart the hand, no less than the foot needs the head or the hand the heart. Even the hair and nails and the coarse cuticle on the soles of the feet have their use, and add to the beauty, completeness and perfection of the whole.
Behold, here, then, in the human body, a representative image of heaven!—the most perfect image of order, harmony, unity, freedom, mutual dependence and brotherly love! ”

“ The woodcutter, returning and discovering what use his wife has made of the first wish, angrily wishes the sausages were growing at the end of her nose, and lo, so they are. The third wish still remains. But what will avail all the honor and wealth in the world if one’s wife is to make one ridiculous by carrying sausages on the end of her nose? Clearly there is nothing to be done but to utilize the third wish in wishing the sausages off again. And, this accomplished, the fairy appears to preach a homely sermon, pointing out how vain are human wishes and ambitions. ”

“ If you seize the opportunities, which are many, you may have what you please by wishing for it. But the condition is in every case the same: the nature of the wish must be kept secret. You may journey to Jarrow, and sitting in Bede’s chair, make your wish; or, nearer at hand, there is a stone seat at Finchale Priory credited with the same power. If you see a horseshoe or a nail, pick it up, throw it over your left shoulder and wish; and wish also if you see a piebald horse, but you must manage to do so before you see its tail. ”

“ If we take these fairy tales as such they must be conceived at once as wish dreams or other corresponding wish structures of the rejected maidens or the simpletons. A similar relation can be worked out as with the motive of "The Little Tear Jug." What can be for the individual a healing, wish-fulfilling surrogate for reality, can also be generalized as a wish product of a whole set of people, of an entire category of people living under the same conditions, in which connection the appropriateness is not as important as the psychological tendency to think in the sense of the wish. ”

“ Such a current in the apparatus which emanates from pain and strives for pleasure we call a wish. We have said that nothing but a wish is capable of setting the apparatus in motion, and that the discharge of excitement in the apparatus is regulated automatically by the perception of pleasure and pain. The first wish must have been an hallucinatory occupation of the memory for gratification. ”

“ He stood before a large portal hung with thick, blooming garlands. Two garlands were fastened to a button at the upper part of the door and hung down separated one from one another. While the portal was at first about the size of a mouth it became a church portal into which he as a very small man entered. It appeared to him as though he was leading someone. [3]
Naturally here we are dealing with an erotic wish dream which is prophetic of a happy future while indeed only too often the wish fulfillment in the dream is a surrogate for reality which refuses the fulfillment of the wish. ”

“ Again she sat herself down to think what ought to be the next wish. This time she took even longer than before and made several deep wrinkles in her forehead, but she finally wished that the fairies should come and help her out of her difficulties. ”

“ What the revelation of the complex vision indicates is that this loathing of the body, this revulsion against the body, this craving to escape from the body, is a mood which springs up out of the eternal malice. It is from the emotion of love in its attitude to the body that we arrive at the idea of the sacredness of the body and at the idea of what might be called "the eternal reality of the body." ”

“ Before the soul is outside, The heart which wants to burst in the body Raises and lifts the chest Which nearly touches the backbone.—The face is discoloured and pale, And the eyes veiled in the head. Speech fails him, For the tongue cleaves to the palate. ”

“ The whole torso is gently stirred by the emotion springing up from the depths of the flesh to die out upon the surface of the imperceptibly agitated muscles. He leans lightly backward, bending like a bow and at the same time like a traveler walking toward the dawn; he is drawn on by the desire to renew this inner emotion that swells his human heart almost to the bursting-point. ”

“ If a poor pilgrim, under a necessity of travelling a dangerous and difficult road, had, through his own perverseness lost the use of a leg, and the sight of one eye, could we be said, to have any charitable concern for his perverseness and misfortune, unless we were glad to see that he had one good leg, and one good eye still left, and unless we hoped and desired they might bring him at last to his journey’s end? ”

“ Under the best-loved and most beautiful face we know, there is hidden a skull as ghastly as that from which we turn aside with a shudder in the anatomist's cabinet. We smile, and are gay enough; God pity us! We try to forget our heart-aches and remorse. We even call our lives commonplace, and, bearing our own heaviest burdens silently, we try to keep the commandment, and to bear one another's also. ”

“ Holding the body, neck, and head straight and unmoved, perfectly determined, and not working in any direction, but as if beholding the end of his own nose, with his heart in supreme peace, devoid of fear, with thought controlled and heart in me as the supreme goal, he remains. ”

“ Howbeit no further harm came to them beyond this, so that the next morning they went their way in peace; and I warrant you Master Neckbone got no kicks that day from them, departing. [Footnote: This incident of the Neckbone is very much like the common nursery tale of Teeny Tiny, in which an old woman takes home a human bone and puts it in the cupboard. It torments her all night by its cries.] ”

“ Her hollow eyes and worn countenance had a ghastly appearance; her cheek-bones, her open fair brow, the projection of the mouth, stood fearfully prominent; you might tell each bone in the thin anatomy of her frame. Her hand hung powerless; each joint lay bare, so that the light penetrated through and through. It was strange that life could exist in what was wasted and worn into a very type of death. ”

“ Both knees and heart, in crying night and day,
Come, come, my God, O come!
But no hearing.
O that thou shouldst give dust a tongue
To crie to thee,
And then not heare it crying! all day long
My heart was in my knee,
But no hearing. ”

“ She knew well she would not, for love, however spiritual, includes the body as well as the spirit, and however fine, cannot but take the body as the outward and visible sign of the beloved soul, its expression and aura. ”

“ From this part of the legacy of the stranger, my mind reverted to the other. I surveyed my limbs, all the joints and articulations of my frame, with curiosity and astonishment. “What!” exclaimed I, “these limbs, this complicated but brittle frame, shall last for ever! No disease shall attack it; no pain shall seize it; death shall withhold from it for ever his abhorred grasp! Perpetual vigour, perpetual activity, perpetual youth, shall take up their abode with me! Time shall generate in me no decay, shall not add a wrinkle to my brow, or convert a hair of my head to grey! ”

“ We turn to numberless wish structures occurring in fairy tales—also in mythology, legends, beliefs in magic, etc.—which may be pointed out with little difficulty to correspond, in part most naïvely, to human wishes created from our insufficiencies, this is one side of their significance at least. ”

“ Who can say when the first wish opens its pious eyes in the child’s soul? The child probably sleeps away the first few weeks of its existence without a single wish, all its behaviour being probably only manifestations of its inherited instincts. ”

“ Because you want to have everything in your own volition, your deliberate voluntary consciousness. You want it all in that loathsome little skull of yours, that ought to be cracked like a nut. For you'll be the same till it is cracked, like an insect in its skin. If one cracked your skull perhaps one might get a spontaneous, passionate woman out of you, with real sensuality. ”

“ These loose-hung bones seem shapely still, and tall,—
⁠Didst ever see a woman's bones, my lord?"
Often, God help me! I remember when
⁠I was a simple boy, fifteen years old,
The Jacquerie froze up the blood of men
⁠With their fell deeds, not fit now to be told:
God help again! ”

“ He was ashamed to go on kneeling, ashamed to rise from his knees. At last, as it were from his inmost heart, a still small voice seemed to breathe forth the words of the publican, "God be merciful to me a sinner!" He repeated them over and over, clinging to them as for his life, and rose from his knees comforted and humbled, and ready to face the whole world. ”

“ A ghastly deathlike skeleton, all the hue of life perished from a face on which grief and despair had traced deep furrows—his beard and nails, from long neglect, grown to a frightful length-his clothes rotten and hanging about him in tatters ”

“ What is the pain of a shattered right elbow, a broken left arm, a bullet hole in the right thigh and another in the left calf, when one is on the road to where one’s heart is, and one is filled with the divine wonder of first love?
He could afford to pity the poor uninjured Bertram Greene of yesterday, marching farther and farther from where all hope, happiness, joy, peace and plenty lay, where love lay, and where alone in all the world could he know content. ”

“ But to that rib also clung the desire to be loved. Otherwise, in the human race, the male would be slain yearly like the drone of the hive. But the strange thing that grew from the rib, like flowers from buried carrion, desired love. ”

“ The nerves with their muscles obey the tendons as soldiers obey the officers, and the tendons obey the Common [central] Sense as the officers obey the general. [27] Thus the joint of the bones obeys the nerve, and the nerve the muscle, and the muscle the tendon and the tendon the Common Sense. And the Common Sense is the seat of the soul [28] , and memory is its ammunition, and the impressibility is its referendary since the sense waits on the soul and not the soul on the sense. ”

“ She gave him five smooth stones to make him wise.
The first stone is love, and that shall fail you.
The second stone is hate, and that shall fail you.
The third stone is knowledge, and that shall fail you.
The fourth stone is prayer, and that shall fail you.
The fifth stone shall not fail you.
For what is love, O lovers of my tribe?
And what is love, O women of my day?
Love is a farthing piece, a bloody bribe
Pressed in the palm of God—and thrown away. ”

“ For when those excellent men have done investigating the twirligigs of the brain to find out where the soul is, let them consider this much more practical matter, that you cannot relieve the pain in one limb without driving it into some other; and so I exchanged twinges in the left knee for a horrible great pain in the right. I sat down on a bridge, and wondered; I saw before me hundreds upon hundreds of miles, painful and exhausted, and I asked heaven if this was necessary to a pilgrimage. ”

“ Then I longed to be in the place of one of the goddesses or nymphs in the wanton adventures.
The blood coursed hotly through my veins. I felt the need of something which I never had before, something to quench the seething heat for the first time generated in my loins. I put my hand on the seat of desire; the young hair which grew there had not yet become thick enough to protect the lips beneath from the most casual touch. ”

“ When I look at myself, I find I have got hinges all over my body. I have hinges to my legs, hinges to my jaws, hinges to my feet. If I want to take hold of any thing, there are hinges to my hands to do it with. If my heart thinks, and I want to speak, I have got hinges to my jaws. If I want to walk, I have hinges to my feet. ”

“ Behind the fleshly covering of the body, within the very skin and bones it seemed, there flowed with steady splendor an effect of charging new vitality that had an air of radiating from her face and figure with the glow and rush of increased life. ”