The classical example of a successful research programme is Newton's gravitational theory: possibly the most successful research programme ever.
Traits don't change, states of mind do.
It's tremendously hard work. Yes, I love arranging the words and having them fall on the ear the right way and you know you're not quite there and you're redoing it and redoing it and there's a wonderful thrill to it. But it is hard.
I suspect the most we can hope for, and it's no small hope, is that we never give up, that we never stop giving ourselves permission to try to love and receive love.
You couldn't make yourself stop feeling a certain way, no matter what the other person did. You had to just wait. Eventually the feeling went away because others came along. Or sometimes it didn't go away but got squeezed into something tiny, and hung like a piece of tinsel in the back of your mind.
The facts didn't matter. Their stories mattered, and each of their stories belonged to each of them alone.
I would also hope that readers receive a larger understanding, or a different understanding, of what it means to be human, than they might have had before. We suffer from being quick to judge, quick to make excuses for ourselves and others, and I would like the reader to feel that we are all, more or less, in a similar state as we love and disappoint one another, and that we try, most of us, as best we can, and that to fail and succeed is what we do.
One forgives the critic - perhaps - but never the good-natured friend.
Therefore we well observe that the title of perfect cadence is attached only to a dominant that progresses to the main tone, because this dominant, which is naturally contained within the harmony of the main tone, seems, when it progresses to it, to return as if to its source.
. . . he broke her heart and made her crave his touch even while she was trying to figure out where to hide his body.
Social Security is a tax.