From Strangers to Sisters: A Journey of Friendship and Dreams

Selected 100 classic TED talks, lasting 8-15 minutes, covering innovation, growth, and future trends. Offers MP3 online streaming, downloads, and English transcripts to help improve your listening and speaking skills. Ignite your learning passion with the power of ideas! Here is the current collection of 【TED】100 classic talk listening materials. Consistent practice brings your English closer to daily life!

Gambling. Quit your job with no savings and a rough sketch of the rest of your life. Withdraw money from your 401k, pay the penalty, why wait? In this economy, everything you own is worth more than it will ever be. Cut your hair. Call yourself new. Call your ex. Call Robin. Tell her you bought a ticket to the bay. Paso, Robla's road trip. Wine taste. Buy a mall back and a tight red tea. Eat a cookie from an LA dispensary. Smoke around bed and breakfast, hillside fire pit with San Diego newlyweds and vineyard view. Go to the water with your girls and grease stained bags of burgers. Sit on driftwood. Sunset. Remember, you folded. Remember your place. Then the night in Reno, resent the safety of the slots sit at the black jack table, hand the dealer rent, retirement, pray God cares enough to pony up an ace. Leaving lunch on Lake Tahoe, they say is deep and cold enough to preserve a body whole. Railroad workers, mafia, military and possibly a monster like Loch Ness, no one can prove it. Ignore the math. Odds are a distraction. What matters is the chip count. The cards on the table, the cards in your hand, you must be willing to lose. (resilient)

When the dream was a notion, it lived in the desert near Edwards Air Force Base, where NASA tested spaceships. It fed on cactus and stars, but it kept being delayed. It's not time, they said. The dream grew impatient. Broke water extracted from its mother in a bed of wrecked strawberries. As a teenager, it cried, took endless drives over the grapevine out of a town ripe with oranges and silence, get me out of here, it begged. It was so tiny and delicate, you feared for its life. It seemed a butterfly might land on its face and crush it. It frightened you to love something so much. Later, it rebelled, got drunk, handcuffed for urinating whiskey on the neighbor's rose bushes. The dream had issues, needs don't ignore me. It screamed. It needed skyscrapers and nicotine needed to stay home reading the Easter parade instead of going to its job as a waitress at a restaurant where it could not afford the food. (impatient)

The dream argued with itself with the truth. We didn't have the dream, the dream had you. Every single one of its plans fell through. I give up, it cried, I quit. Hit itself in the dark until finally it heard its name being called. Pondered the unspeakable miracle of sticking around long enough to be seen. Now it looks around for the ones who've waited years for its arrival. They always come for you, don't they, your girls. With their cross fingers and belief in you, no destination they say, no maps, no idea where we're headed. And even though you cannot believe this is happening, even though you are hallucinating with fear. You hear yourself say it, I am ready, I am ready, let's go. (intuition)

Everyone always wants to know how we became sisters, how do you two meet like we're a married couple. I like to say we met online. We met at the New York and Powerts Cafe in 1999. Every Friday night of our young lives spent in the audience or on the mic. Miss one Friday and you would hear about the poet who killed it, you should have been there. I killed it. The night I met Jen, she was sitting on the lap of my arch nemesis. I swear we are never going to be friends. Really? We are not going to be friends because I'm friends with someone you don't like. Absolutely, without a doubt. Miss Summiner one, menacing. I love it when women size me up and spit me out before they've ever met me, before I've said one word. The phrase dismissed before investigation comes to mind. Miss Summiner two, fraud. Felice likes to claim she believes in science and math that she proceeds through life with logic like a man. A lot of fairness and justice, real open mind at play. Felice is not a detective. She only plays one on stage. And when I say that, I say it as a private investigator license in the state of New York. Sherlock Holmes doesn't need a license. He solves crime. So do I. Using science and my intuition. Everything I know about detective work I learned on TV. So do you. (meltdown)

One winter, when you had no money, you mailed her flowers from Paris because she was having surgery one spring in your deepest heartbreak. She stood with you in the rain on Fulton Street. This isn't your dreams. This you can leave them. One winter, one spring, two decades, two women, one dream. Your mother's names are Sheila. They quote the Bible, say, you are fearfully and wonderfully made. Say boy, it's good you're done with that MFA. You and your sister laugh, they got that pesky dream is finished. Now you can finally get back the peeling potatoes and shocking corn. When a sister loves a sister, you want her in the audience when your play premieres at the National Theater in Washington, DC. When a sister loves a sister, she cheers and screams when an agent agrees to send out your stories. When a sister loves a sister, she celebrates your artistic, romantic and spiritual victories. You are like young girls becoming what they always dreamed of becoming when they grew up. When a sister loves a sister, you listen to her read thinking as heaven to the gods is poetry to the beloved. (radical)