Every person has a potential in him but the need is to discover it. Everybody around you has the same potential but what you need is Enthusiasm, Dedication, Honesty, Focussed-Approach and Self-Confidence. These all can come only from you and what you need is to bring them out. Leave the tendency of worrying about the results, just give your best and you would definitely reap very good harvest one day. And your given best will again come to you.

An old man, going a lone highway,
Came, at the evening, cold and gray,
To a chasm, vast, and deep, and wide,
Through which was flowing a sullen tide.
The old man crossed in the twilight dim;
The sullen stream had no fears for him;
But he turned, when safe on the other side,
And built a bridge to span the tide.
"Old man,"said a fellow pilgrim, near,
"You are wasting strength with building here;
Your journey will end with the ending day;
You never again must pass this way;
You have crossed the chasm, deep and wide -
Why build you the bridge at the eventide?"
The builder lifted his old gray head:
"Good friend, in the path I have come," he said,
"There followeth after me today
A youth, whose feet must pass this way.
This chasm, that has been naught to me,
To that fair-haired youth may a pitfall be.
He, too, must cross in the twilight dim;
Good friend, I am building the bridge for him."

You are that kind of a jewel to me,
who is as precious as the,
diamond which sinked,
when the titanic sanked.

you are that kind of a star,
that always sparkles and,
looks different from others.
you are that star with whom,
i sometimes talk,
when i am sad.

you are that talking picture to me,
with whom i talk,
when i fell awkward to say,
something in front of you.

you are that friend to me,
to the destiny has forgot to give me as,
A SISTER.

you are like a beautiful rainbow to me,
who makes me smile,
when i've been through a storm.


you are not less than,
a comic character,
whom i love a lot and,
who makes me fell happy and laugh.

you are the one who makes me feel that,
i am someone and,
i have cetain duties to carry on.

you are like an inspiration to me,
when i've lost all hopes,
and you bring out a world inside of me,
that i never knew i had.

you are the one friend,
for whom i would,
like to take millions of births,
to thank you,
for what you have done for me-----from the begining to the end.

you are the friend,
infront of whom,
i never make excuses,
and never tells lies.
because you know me,
better than anyone would ever had.
you know me by my faults and demerits,
rather than my,
few good points.

you are a friend,
who is always close to me,
on whom i can always count on,
who multiplies my JOYS and SORROWS,
by a smile and a laugh.

you are a friend,
who knows what i am thinking.
What my likes and dislike are,
what i wished to be,
and that always think good of me.

you are like a candle,
who's flame glows brighter,
at the time of darkness.

you are a friend,
with whom i celebrate,
the happiness you give to me,
with whom i would like to make,
everyday of my life-----A HOLIDAY,
and want to celebrate it as never before.

you are a friend,
who always forgives me,
even though when i am wrong.

you are friend,
who is always there,
and,
will be always there,
in my life, no matter what.
and not like the waves upon the sand,
day and night.

YOU and I are something else,
like the permanent things,
there fatty me,
or my smeely socks,
which never goes away.

you are a friend,
who will accompany me,
to the end,
no matter what!

you are a friend,
to whom i would like,
to give one gift,
THE ABILITY TO SEE YOURSELF,
as the others do.
because except this,
i don't have he ther precious gift for you.

you are a friend,
to whom,
i hate to say GOOD BYE,
because i need you and,
want you to be always,
near and closer to me.

each day spent with you is better than the last.
and my first day spent with you was the best day of my life.


you are the friend,
who thinks i am a good egg,
even though you know,
i am slightly cracked.

you are a friend,
who has given me everything.
from a good advice,
to a pep talk,
when i was sad.

you are the reason,
for my smile.
you are the reason,
for my sucess.
you are the reason,
for my good behavior with others.
you are the reason,
for everything good in me.

you are a friend,
i sometimes share a silence,
yet feel so comfortable.

you are a friend,
who never let me realized,
that i am not in a level with you,
that i don't deserve you,
that i am not as good and as great as you are,
and that,
as beautiful and as nice by heart as you.

you never looked down upon me but ,
always encouraged me.

to have a friend like you,
TINNY,
is my highest delight of my life.

you are a friend,
that provides me with strength,
when i need the most.

i value you more than i value my life.
so, when i say, YOU ARE MY FRIEND, it's just means,
YOU ARE MY LIFE.

Now we are a kind of friends,
who have shared,
so much laughter,
so many tears.
i know,
we are not sister by birth,
but sisters,
whom destiny has forgot to give us,
and there's something,
that puts us together by hearts.

I THANK YOU for all the,
kindness, honesty, warmth and goodness,
you have shown to me.
And in return,
i have the,
BLOOD OF MY BODY,
ALL FOR YOU.

"A friend is someone who gives you total freedom to be yourself." -Jim Morrison

The person had jaggedy brown hair cut close to its face and wore one of those undershirtlike tops with faded jeans cut off above the knees. He couldn't honestly tell whether it was a girl or a boy.
"Hi," he or she said, jerking his or her head toward the Perkins place. "We just moved in."

Jess stood where he was, staring.

The person slid off the fence and came toward him. "I thought we might as well be friends," it said. "There's no one else close by."

Girl, he decided. Definitely girl, but he couldn't have said why he was suddenly sure.

This is for you, my best friend,
the one person i can tell my soul too
Who can relate to me like no other
Who I can laugh with to no extents,
Who I can cry too when times are tough,
Who can help me with the problems of my life.

Never have you turned your back on me
Or told me I wasnt good enough
Or let me down

I don't think you know what that means to me
You have went through so much pain and you still have time
For me.
And I love you for listening even when inside YOU are dying
And I look up too you because you are strong,
and caring
and beautiful.
Even though you don't think you are.

And I hope you know that I am always here
To listen to you laugh and cry and help
In all the ways that i can
And I will try to be at least half the friend you are
To me.

I hope you know I would not be the person I am today, with out you.
My best friend

Knowledge should never be bound by the limits of a singular domain. it should percolate into the multiple hues of life & spread ever many a sphere but mer knowledge may not suffice unless it exhibits the character of versatility and flexibility to transform itself but when it obeys it forms the basis of a structure that grows with the sky as its limit.

Hello Dears


Good fiction has never been about moral instruction; it would be much easier to write if it were. Its more imposing task is to do justice to the inexhaustible complexity of human motivation. Because our motives are often hidden from us, because the canvas of even our own experience can be too much for our eye to take in, we look to writers to help make comprehensible the reasons why people act the way they act, why they transgress, why they fail to transgress. In this respect the fictional outlaw has at least as much to teach us as the upright citizen—a principle older than Céline or Shakespeare or Milton, perhaps as old as storytelling itself.

One of contemporary fiction’s most frustrating tropes, however, holds that even the most shocking transgression is made psychologically credible when a character carries it out not for exotic or obscure reasons but for no reason whatsoever. The technique itself is less startling than its rate of critical success, for the credibility of such inventions depends on accepting the proposition that they are not inventions at all but something more profound, more authentic, than mere art.

An exemplary case is that of Neil LaBute, the widely praised filmmaker (In the Company of Men, Your Friends & Neighbors) and playwright (Fat Pig), who has now brought his troupe of hideous men into the realm of the short story with a debut collection entitled Seconds of Pleasure. The narrator of “Perfect,” the lead story in the book, has a wife, and that wife has an unsightly mole on her shoulder, and her husband fantasizes about pinning her to the ground and digging the mole out of her flesh with a potato peeler; but before he can tell us about all that, there is something important that he needs to establish:

I am not perfect. Not even close. In fact, I’m barely average, if anything. I’m just this extremely basic guy who goes pretty much unnoticed most of the time. . . . I’m valuable at work, dependable and pleasant, and a man who is generally seen as “going places.”
It’s a less than subtle setup for the shocks that follow, but it’s something more than that as well, for he’s far from the only character in Seconds of Pleasure to wave so insistently the flag of his own ordinariness; the narrator of “Los Feliz,” to cite another example, describes himself by telling us—not once, but three times—that he has “the wife and the 2.7 kids.” Nor do we have to take the characters’ own words for it, for LaBute avails himself of a number of techniques to reinforce the message that his creations are Everymen, representatives of a kind of cultural baseline. None of the narrators, for instance, has a name, and only a few of the stories are given specific geographic settings (usually in Hollywood). Which is not to suggest that LaBute has anything against proper nouns per se: indeed, the book’s strongest attempt at sensory detail is to refer to objects by their brand names. “He hangs up,” goes a representative sentence, “and slips the Motorola deep into his bathrobe pocket for safekeeping as he starts to peel off his Jockeys.”

Relying on words such as “Lexus” and “Dockers” and “Bulova” to do the work of visual description and, to a great extent, characterization is not a tactic invented by LaBute, of course; it’s become a commonplace of contemporary fiction since the appearance of the Ur-text of this practice, Bret Easton Ellis’s laboriously shocking American Psycho. The image in which such work traffics is ready-made and mass-produced, one that readers collectively see in exactly the same way, one that is entirely dependent upon their having seen it somewhere else before. This off-the-rack approach to creation is sometimes munificently presumed to constitute a “comment” on the character’s mindset or on the society that generates it, even when the absence of the writer’s own critical faculties makes it seem less a comment than a symptom. Still, to call it laziness and leave it at that is to miss this technique’s real import. The fiction writer’s classical tactic has been to try to make imaginary people seem real by taking pains to render them as distinctly, as uniquely, as possible. But to define one’s characters, or to suggest that they define themselves, via mass-produced cultural referents is to imagine individuals as, ultimately, members of a crowd, and to suggest that what animates them is not their uniqueness but their commonality.

Commonality with whom, though? LaBute, for one, seems less than honest about this. Although most of the stories in Seconds of Pleasure appear at first to be two-character pieces, before long you begin to notice the recurring presence of a third figure on the page, one whose attention seems to be more important to the narrator than that of the second character: you. In story after story, the reader is rhetorically addressed by the narrator: “Pitiful, you say? Insipid and facile, not to mention shallow? I agree.” Or: “You know how many times I’ve tried to make that woman laugh? Do you?!” There’s something oddly literal about all this apostrophizing. LaBute’s narrators speak like people who know they are being watched by someone they cannot see or hear. They confront us instead of our inhabiting them. We are their judges—and as such we take note of their statements in their own defense but do not feel compelled to respond. The message these characters are sending, in harping on their own un-extraordinariness, is not how much they have in common with the reader, or even with the writer, but how much they have in common with each other. The real alliance forged by all those paranoid invocations of “you” is not between reader and character but between reader and author. In LaBute’s work the process of creation is a voyeuristic rather than an empathetic one. The approach to character is always from the outside in.

This runs counter to LaBute’s own public pronouncements about his work, in which he suggests that the vindictive, selfish, violent, supremely angry men who are the protagonists are, in fact, him. It’s always been a disingenuous stance, though, and it’s on the page—where he can’t rely on the help of actors to contribute at least a behavioral show of empathy—that his fundamental condescension to his characters is revealed. It would be a mistake to ascribe this condescension to inexperience, for LaBute has made his estimable career in films and on stage precisely by cultivating this idea of men’s inescapable essence, by insisting that his creations are not really creations at all but bravely unbowdlerized portraits of, as the title of one of his movies has it, “Your Friends & Neighbors.” The psychological source of their most vicious thoughts and actions, he insists, is to be sought not in the characters themselves, or even in their creator, but in a self-fulfilling postulate about how men “really” are. It’s a savvy way to frame your own work, because it has the effect of preempting criticism: if you dislike LaBute’s art—at least if you’re a man—presumably it’s not because you actually dislike it but because you can’t take it. If his art is a mirror, then rejecting the art itself risks seeming like a kind of denial, an unwillingness to confront your true nature.

* * *

Women, too, have a true nature in LaBute’s art. They come in three guises: attractive and stupid (good for sex), unattractive and stupid (still good for sex), and hostile, shrewish, and smart (wives). The willingness to flirt with blatant misogyny is sometimes cited as the most daring element of LaBute’s work, perhaps because it’s the aspect that opens him up most easily to condemnation. But it’s hard to get roiled up by a vision of battle-ax wives and licentious single babes that’s about as edgy as a Playboy cartoon. What’s off-putting about it has nothing to do with gender stereotypes at all: it’s the sense of manufactured confrontation, the artistic bad faith involved in positing a universe so full of hostility that all an author has to do to motivate an argument—or a betrayal, or a fight, or a rape, or a murder—is to take a couple of characters at random and turn them to face each other. As a dramatist, LaBute could hardly set the bar for conflict any lower than he does. If all wives are harridans, and all men are pathologically angry, then the author barely has to do anything to engineer an attack such as this one: “I’m not turning around because you sicken me. That’s why. You piss me off and treat me so badly that I’ve just about had all that I can take. Okay? This is a declaration of war, I guess, because I have had my fill.”

The women do sometimes strike back, in their way. The betrayed wife in “Loose Change” throws herself “like a rabid dog . . . again and again” against the driver’s-side window of her husband’s car. In “Maraschino,” a young woman sleeps with her father, who, having left her mother when she was a child, doesn’t recognize her now; her motivation for doing so (“It’s funny, lying there, letting him fuck me like that”) is nonexistent, which is to say that it’s a Mystery, one for the reader to speculate.

Meanwhile, the men insist that they themselves are not mysterious at all. And although they might be prone to the occasional spontaneous combustion—physical assault, sexual revenge, verbal cruelty of every sort—what’s really intended to provoke us is not what they feel but everything they don’t feel. That free-floating, ever present masculine anger enables LaBute’s men to commit a staggering range of heinous acts with no apparent motivation or remorse. The acts themselves are dispassionate; what is intended to be shocking in each case is not the cruelty itself so much as the lack of affect and reflection that surrounds both the deed and its aftermath. In the story titled “Ravishing,” for instance, two friends make a snuff film: “Standing there, looking at each other afterward, we start to smile at a job well done—light from the camera humming away; it doesn’t know the difference between this and a Little League game.”

And it’s here, finally, that we see the real upside for LaBute of the voyeuristic approach to character: it allows him to pretend that his own job is as easy, as devoid of responsibility, as the camera’s. It’s a way of ducking what a more sophisticated writer might consider his primary artistic responsibility: namely, a credible motivation for his imaginary characters to say and do the things they say and do. LaBute tries to wriggle out of this job by insisting it was never his job to begin with; if we accept the somewhat counterintuitive assertion that his characters spring not from him but from a condescendingly defined maleness, that he is not inventing them but exposing them, then nothing about their individual situations needs to be explained to us, none of them really needs a reason in order to act, in which case even the most extreme action is justified. And if that extreme, violent, pathological behavior is negatively defined—that is, as a matter not of feeling something extraordinary but of feeling nothing at all—then that makes an understanding of your characters’ motives even easier to simulate. You just feel nothing, too.

But to claim significance for a vacuum is easy; in the rueful words of Flannery O’Connor, something has to be in a story in the first place before it can then be artfully left out. When it comes to the moral dimension of a work of narrative art—human beings choosing, whether nobly or foolishly, from a range of potential actions and in the face of some sort of internal or external opposition—one writer’s vacuum is really the same as another’s. Imaginary people doing things for no reason at all: it’s a default position some artists try to legitimate by insisting that the empty space at the center of their work is not something they are actively creating but something they are courageously exposing. This is the essential con in Neil LaBute’s art, and he isn’t the only contemporary writer who’s figured out how to work it.

* * *

The novel, writes Milan Kundera in his essay collection Testaments Betrayed, is “a realm where moral judgment is suspended. . . . From the viewpoint of the novel’s wisdom, that fervid readiness to judge is the most detestable stupidity, the most pernicious evil. Not that the novelist utterly denies that moral judgment is legitimate, but that he refuses it a place in the novel. If you like, you can accuse Panurge of cowardice, accuse Emma Bovary, accuse Rastignac—that’s your business; the novelist has nothing to do with it.”

A subtle idea, one that at first pass doesn’t sound too far removed from the studied amorality of a LaBute story. There’s a difference, however, and it has nothing in the least to do with the notion of fiction as a moral parable, or with a belief that good should triumph over evil or vice versa. The difference lies with Kundera’s concept of the suspension of judgment, which is not a mere matter of authorial inactivity. Since a reader’s final judgment of a character represents the terminal point of that character’s development, the writer is well advised to delay the reader’s ability—indeed, the reader’s human instinct, as Kundera calls it—to arrive at that point. The method for frustrating that inclination is not simply to ignore everything associated with morality altogether but actively to complicate it, to provide multiple judgments, multiple moral viewpoints, within the work of fiction itself. Moral judgment is not ignored or banished or declared moot but suspended, in the way that, say, a bridge is suspended: via tension between opposites, a tension that, at least for the term of the story itself, holds at bay our impatience to make up our minds.

Books that generate that sense of opposition internally, by credibly advancing more than one idea, are working at the highest level. Books that depend for their sense of opposition on the straw man of a presupposed bourgeois mentality outside the fiction itself—on shock value, in other words—are working in conditions of profound safety disguised as risk. The characters suffer no repercussions (nor do the writers, for that matter, regardless of outlaw posturing), but the atmosphere is one of self-conscious edginess and aesthetic daring.

A. M. Homes’s novel Music for Torching opens on a young couple named Paul and Elaine, who live in the suburbs north of Manhattan. Dissatisfied with their empty, wretched existence, they try—spontaneously and, as it turns out, unsuccessfully—to burn their own house down. This act symbolizes their desperation to break free from the relentless pressures of suburban conformity. The sinister, violent heart that beats beneath the repressively pristine exterior of life in the suburbs: surely it behooves a writer to at least question such received ideas rather than found one’s work on them. In this case, though, the soul-crushing imperative to behave normally is embodied nowhere inside the novel itself; on the contrary, the daily life of this particular suburb—cross-dressing, child endangerment, genital tattooing—amounts to a virtual orgy of rebellion, but against what? The specter of Stepfordesque repression is a kind of prefabricated mentality that Homes occasionally invokes (“Nothing matters to me more than being normal,” says one neighborhood housewife, shortly before violating Elaine with a strap-on dildo named Buster) but that the reader is expected to have previously internalized. Within the novel there is no resistance to self-expression whatsoever—indeed, to the extent that the characters do display a tendency toward conformity, it’s in their relentless refusal to conform, their compulsion to let their freak flags fly. No one is ever troubled or surprised or inconvenienced by anything anyone else does; one running joke involves an obscene phone caller to whom everyone in town, right down to the stock boy at the local supermarket, reacts with the same comic indifference. Rather than give credible life to opposing ideas, Homes’s characters are all in service to the same idea; our own presumed beliefs about bourgeois normality are supposed to provide the resistance that renders their behavior transgressive in the first place.

Will Self’s characters are conceived as examples (though admittedly extreme ones) of certain societal types, from crack addicts to self-absorbed yuppies. The stories in Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys depend heavily upon a sense of otherness and contempt; their remote tone, as well as their frequent forays into the fantastic, give them the quality of moral fables. They are saved by their own taste for low comedy, which keeps things from getting too sanctimonious—and Self never attempts to legitimate his own outré taste in incident by insisting, as LaBute does, that he’s not enjoying himself but rather doing his reluctant duty. Still, creating characters that are easily mocked and then mocking them does not carry an exceptionally high degree of difficulty. In nearly every story, a solipsistic prig receives the comeuppance he deserves, and what is supposed to differentiate this comeuppance from the shooting of fish in a barrel is that the prigs are not inventions but social indictments, diagnoses of the world outside the fiction itself. When, in “The Nonce Prize,” two London crack addicts named Gerald and Shaun “manage to achieve very considerable objectivity about their favourite shared fantasy—the abduction, buggering, torture, mutilation, and eventual murder of a young boy, the younger the better,” Self’s detached, condescending tone is meant not to frustrate judgment but to encourage it. No effort is made to render these characters or their desires. Their amorality is not developed from the inside in a way that might make it credible or even frighteningly comprehensible. The book is a trip to the moral zoo.

One obvious technical maneuver that contributes to the air of smug diagnosis in Self’s work (and to a lesser extent in Homes’s) is the use of a particularly remote third-person narrator. Conversely, one way an author might try to close the clinical gap between himself and his characters is to write in the first person, making it necessary, to some extent, to assume that character, to inhabit him or her, to generate a sense of complicity that is passed on to the reader as well. James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice is a classic example of a novel that uses the “I” to produce its own completely organic outlaw morality. Cain’s narrator, Frank Chambers, meets a woman on page 1, and by page 14 he is plotting to murder her husband—not because he feels nothing but because he feels so overwhelmingly.

The first-person narrator of Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Survivor, by contrast, succumbs to the trope of numbness, to the belief that an undefined existential boredom is sufficient motivation for even the most extreme behavior. We first encounter him putting up signs at pay phones urging the deeply depressed to call his own home phone number, as if it were a suicide hot line; when they do, he advises them to go ahead and commit suicide. There’s a cheap, high school nihilism behind the whole conceit, but what’s even more depressingly familiar is the narrator’s insistence that he’s been pushed to such extremes by his own unfeeling and causeless anomie. Eventually, he hijacks a plane with the intention of committing suicide:

You’ll have air-conditioning and stereo music, [the pilot] says, for as long as you can feel anything.
The last time I felt anything, I tell him, was a ways back.
Dennis Cooper’s novel Frisk also features a narrator who can’t feel anything, except when viewing snuff pornography or, ultimately, acting it out himself. Here, too, the Emptiness of Modern Life is presumed to take the place of character development, and even the most egregious acts of violence are carried out not for some terrible or exotic reason but, much more simply, for no reason at all. In this case the first-person voice becomes a boon, for the narrator’s lack of self-knowledge can trump any sense of responsibility on the author’s part to understand things better himself: “I was about to come. I picked up an empty beer bottle without even thinking and hit the guy over the head. I don’t know why . . . Then I crawled across the room and sat cross-legged, watching him bleed to death. I stayed there all night, worn out, vaguely wondering why I didn’t go phone the police, or feel guilt or sympathy for his friends.”

Small wonder most of these books have a hard time ending. “Incident,” E. M. Forster once advised novelists, “springs out of character; and having occurred, it alters that character.” But characters who experience no resistance and who act for no reason cannot be altered by events; they don’t develop, they just intensify. Music for Torching ends with the gratuitous death of a child at the hands of a playmate in a Columbine-like school shooting. Frisk devolves into an orgy of rape, torture, and disembowelment that strains mightily to be shocking. Survivor’s narrator hijacks a plane, kicks the pilot off, and waits for the inevitable to happen once the fuel runs out. All of them conclude in the way a fireworks show concludes, with an amped-up display of the same thing they’ve been doing all along.

* * *

Many—in fact, most—of the stories in Seconds of Pleasure are narrated in the first person as well; but LaBute has ways of undermining the potential intimacy of this technique and of imposing a safe, clinical distance between himself and the character with whom he purports to claim solidarity. In discussing his wife’s offending mole, the narrator of “Perfect” has a sudden memory “of freshman English back at Pepperdine, where some teaching assistant forced us to read that Nathaniel Hawthorne guy. A short story of his that had to do with some flaw in an otherwise lovely woman, but I can’t remember any of the specifics about it for the life of me.” Understandable, perhaps, that one would remember only dimly something read in freshman English. But that’s just the first time this kind of thing happens:

They remind him of those girls from that John Updike story, the one about the guy in the supermarket. It’s really great, although the title of it doesn’t come easily to mind.

—“Boo-Boo”

Kind of like that one picture of the dude clutching the sides of his head and crying out—you know the one I’m talking about? It’s famous, I think.

—“Grand Slam”

He was nibbling on the cherry—I forget the name of those, what is it?—you know, the one from his glass.

—“Maraschino”

A flash goes off in his head, a snapshot of a film that he saw years ago, in college maybe, of a man obsessed with a young woman’s leg. Her knee or something. One of those French or Italian kinds, where not much happens and the words are carefully printed all along the bottom of the screen.

—“Boo-Boo”

What was it that comedian used to say, that fellow with all the—he’d come onstage and do the wife jokes. Remember? “Take my wife. Please.”

—“Some Do It Naturally”

What are we to make of this motif of cultural ignorance, applied across so many different stories and characters? It’s an instructive bit of bad faith, because while pretending allegiance with his characters, LaBute is actually conducting a conversation with the reader over those characters’ heads. The narrators may be too dumb to know that that picture of the guy “crying out” is called “The Scream,” but you and LaBute certainly aren’t, and so he provides these little interludes during which author and reader can exchange a knowing, indulgent wink before you both turn your attention back to the poor slob at the center of the story.

It’s a device that lays bare LaBute’s contempt for the men with whom he declares solidarity. “I think if women actually had a sense of what we are,” he once told an interviewer, “they would run screaming.” Yet that “we” is itself a lie: his male characters are not surrogates for his own sensibility but sacrifices to it. Artist, diagnose thyself.