Surely it is an odd way to spend your life - sitting alone in a room with a pen in your hand, hour after hour, day after day, year after year, struggling to put words on pieces of paper in order to give birth to what does not exist, except in your he...
If one Egyptian tailor hadn’t cheated on the threads of Joseph’s mantle, Potiphar’s wife would never have been able to tear it, present it as evidence to Potiphar that Joseph attacked her, gotten him thrown in prison, and let him be in a positi...
Personal ministry is not about always knowing what to say. It is not about fixing everything in sight that is broken. Personal ministry is about connecting people with Christ so that they are able to think as he would have them think, desire what he ...
Diversity matters. Not only in what we look like, or what religion we practice, or in whom we love, but also in how we live our lives, including the order in which we go about things, the seasons in which we are able to create art. Those who are enga...
Art glows with faith even in its weakest parts. At every moment, writing is an act of self-confidence – the sheerest, most determined, most stubborn self-belief. You CAN have faith and doubt at the same time; the most insecure writer on the planet ...
Children may not understand all that's happening below the surface of a story. It doesn't matter. Because even though they may not be able to define or verbalize it, they sense there's something more than meets the eye; on an almost subliminal level,...
The idea of some kind of objectively constant, universal literary value is seductive. It feels real. It feels like a stone cold fact that In Search of Lost Time, by Marcel Proust, is better than A Shore Thing, by Snooki. And it may be; Snooki definit...
she feel so helpless when she imagine it will never be she ,who will hold your emotion,she will never get you in her both hands,she will never be able to touch your hair,or your body at the moment when she suppose to be the only one.when she get the ...
If you drop assumptions, and can anticipate the possibilities, you can master the art of strategy. However, if you can only manipulate probability, you can only create a path to victory. But remember, plans can break down. The future is always a step...
Because of the routines we follow, we often forget that life is an ongoing adventure. . . Life is pure adventure, and the sooner we realize that, the quicker we will be able to treat life as art: to bring all our energies to each encounter, to remain...
I must give due praise to the man who first extracted morphine from poppyheads. He was a true benefactor of mankind. The pain stopped seven minutes after the injection. Interesting: the pain passed over me in ceaseless waves, so that I had to gasp fo...
Writing is.... being able to take something whole and fiercely alive that exists inside you in some unknowable combination of thought, feeling, physicality, and spirit, and to then store it like a genie in tense, tiny black symbols on a calm white pa...
The first step is the hardest in every journey of dreams. So If you have had the tenacity to begin then we are confident that the hardest part of your mission is the one lying behind you. Step into the future, knowing that God has got you this far as...
I now wish that I had spent somewhat more of my life with verse. This is not because I fear having missed out on truths that are incapable of statement in prose. There are no such truths; there is nothing about death that Swinburne and Landor knew bu...
Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would no...
A very, in a sense, terrifying aspect of our society, and other societies, is the equanimity and the detachment with which sane, reasonable, sensible people can observe [war]. I think that's more terrifying than the occasional Hitler or LeMay or othe...
Even when I took the drugs I realized that this just wasn't fun anymore. The drugs had become a part of my routine. Something to wake me up. Something to help me sleep. Something to calm my nerves. There was a time when I was able to wake up, go to s...
Compassion, however, should mean providing a mechanism to escape poverty rather than simply maintaining people in an impoverished state by supplying handouts. By doing this we give them an opportunity to elevate their personal situations, which event...
I didn't really have an interest in politics when I first entered the workforce. What I wanted to do was help people who grew up like me. When I was a kid growing up in Tucson, my father lost his job and we lost everything - including our home. We li...
All I really, really want to do is find a very, very fine chocolate store that I can walk into and then figure out how in the world one manages to pick out just a few chocolates out of all those very many chocolates! If I am one day able to walk into...
I believe in strong women. I believe in the woman who is able to stand up for herself. I believe in the woman who doesn't need to hide behind her husband's back. I believe that if you have problems, as a woman you deal with them, you don't play victi...