The weird, weird thing about devastating loss is that life actually goes on. When you're faced with a tragedy, a loss so huge that you have no idea how you can live through it, somehow, the world keeps turning, the seconds keep ticking.
The thing about Tolkien, about , is that it's perfect. It's this whole world, this whole process of immersion, this journey. It's not, I'm pretty sure, actually true, but that makes it more amazing, that someone could make it all up. Reading it chang...
The greatest challenge of my life has been to see and accept the actual truth without great pain and struggle against it.
It is easier for a Russian to become an Atheist, than for any other nationality in the world. And not only does a Russian 'become an Atheist,' but he actually BELIEVES IN Atheism, just as though he had found a new faith, not perceiving that he has pi...
It's sort of my go-to stock image of my childhood, actually. I think it has something to do with knowing I'll never be able to go back to that time that makes me cry every time I listen to it.
I need no master to punish me in order to behave as I ought. If I did, I would be no more than a child who obeys his father's rules only because he fears the whip, and not because he actually means good.
And Kelsea wondered suddenly whether humanity ever actually changed. Did people grow and learn at all as the centuries past? Or was humanity merely like the tide, enlightenment advancing and then retreating as circumstances shifted? The most defining...
I had a dream about you. You were lost in a daydream, when I walked in and you began screaming. But I know that could never actually happen. In real life I only enter people’s nightmares.
a song can take you back instantly to a moment, or a place, or even a person. No matter what else has changed in you or the world, that one song stays the same, just like that moment. Which is pretty amazing, when you actually think about it.
Perhaps that is why desire causes men calamity. By identifying with our desires and taking them too seriously, we not only increase our susceptibility to disappointment, we actually create a climate inhospitable to the free and easy fulfillment of th...
The world likes to tell us not to be judgmental. To be kind and tolerant, loving and forgiving. But what they want and what they they're actually willing to do are two very different things. At the core, the world is shallow. They want physical beaut...
There are considerable mysteries surrounding the strange values that Nature's actual particles have for their mass and charge. For example, there is the unexplained 'fine structure constant' ... governing the strength of electromagnetic interactions,...
And pity--people who inspire it in you are actually very powerful people. To get someone else to take care of you, to feel sorry for you--that takes a lot of strength, smarts, manipulation. Very powerful people.
When we justify a flaw we are actually inventing a new one. When a woman neglects developing her own character, she not only chisels away her own reputation, but the reputation of everyone in her household. pg 48
If, as some savants of consciousness suggest, we are actually agreeing to create, from moment to moment, everything we perceive as real, then it stands to reason that we're also responsible for keeping it going in some harmonious manner.
Keisaku and Eita were expecting to see "the beauty in the morning" as they entered the room. What they actually saw, however, was "The Terror of the Bagworm Queen" rolling around on the floor. It was a scene far removed from the sexy situation the tw...
The huge problems we deal with every day are actually really small. We’re so focused on what bothers us that we don’t even try to see our lives from a clearer perspective.
I hate when counselors and teachers blame everything on low self-esteem in teens. Some of us actually have self-esteem, believe it or not. And when we make mistakes, it's not because of a defect in our psyche. We screw up just because.
Amie frowned. 'That’s what I can’t figure out. I mean everyone wants their happy ending, right? No one cares about reading actual literature anymore anyway. All they want is vampires and supernatural mumbo-jumbo. It’s sick, really.
(In actuality there are no such things as "male" or "female" hormones. Hormones have no sex of their own, and all types of sex hormones are present in all human beings in varying amounts.)
Looked at again and again half consciously by a mind thinking of something else, any object mixes itself so profoundly with the stuff of thought that it loses its actual form and recomposes itself a little differently in an ideal shape which haunts t...
