Like all magical mysteries, the secrets of the Great Work have a triple meaning: they are religious, philosophical and natural. Philosophical gold in religion is the Absolute and Supreme Reason; in philosophy, it is truth; in visible nature, it is th...
He had little respect for anyone who was not willing to put in the effort required to survive and thrive. Not everyone needed the same driving ambition that had fueled him. That had led him to being possibly the richest man in London without a title ...
Man has to eat, so thank God some food tastes good. However, if men had no taste buds, or sense of smell, all food would be good. So hooray! And also boo for boring. That’d mean nothing exciting to look forward to. However, you could eat healthy gr...
It stank pretty bad, of course: manure was caked all over the wagon. But we were free. Right then I was elated with a sense of how faithful God is to his promises; I was free, and I was smiling joyfully on a manure wagon. As we ambled along, I laughe...
Carlyle's genius was many-sided. He touched and ennobled the national life at all points. He lifted a whole generation of young men out of the stagnating atmosphere of materialism and dead orthodoxy into the region of the ideal. With the Master of Ba...
She stared at herself in the mirror. Her eyes were dark, almost black, filled with pain. She'd let someone do that to her. She'd known all along she felt things too deeply. She became attached. She didn't want a lover who could walk away from her, be...
It wasn't chance at all, Gilly. People are yearning creatures. They imagine and strive and hope. Stories about an enchanted band of vagabonds existed before the Carnival itself. But those fairy tales become the focal point of billions of daydreams, a...
I put a saddle on my salad, and I rode my horseradish to Rhode Island, where I was just in time to be late. I think I left my time zone change in my Arizona iced tea, so all I have to offer you to drink is water that’s been redirected from the Colo...
My story is important not because it is mine, God knows, but because if I tell it anything like right, the chances are you will recognize that in many ways it is also yours… it is precisely through these stories in all their particularity, as I hav...
It's possible that the chief of trauma surgery has things backwards. It's possible, even likely, that for all military medicine contributes to specialized skilks, it actually detracts from civilian medicine be diverting resources, research, and perso...
Politeness. Now there's a poor man's virtue if ever there was one. What's so admirable about inoffensiveness, I should like to know. After all, it's easily achieved. One needs no particular talent to be polite. On the contrary, being nice is what's l...
I am human. Like all humans, I do not remember my birth. By the time we wake up to ourselves, we are little children, and our advent is something that happened an eternity ago, at the beginning of time. We live like latecomers to the theater; we must...
All morning I struggled with the sensation of stray wisps of one world seeping through the cracks of another. Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? You leave th...
I am so sad. I am so sad it makes me heavier than the sum of my parts. I shift, restless, but it doesn’t help. It’s like—time. All this time in here is on me, has its hooks in me. Maybe if I sleep more, I’ll wake up and I’ll feel different,...
Do you like Rhiannon more than me?" ... They're two completely different concepts. When a girl asks you a question like that, there's no way you can be honest. They say they want you to be honest, but then they get all upset when you are. You can't w...
My name is growing all the time, and I’ve lived a very long, long time; so my name is like a story. Real names tell you the story of the things they belong to in my language, in the Old Entish as you might say. It is a lovely language, but it takes...
Success, as we categorize it, is a simple and pitiable thing. It's only a matter of degree of wanting, and accident. Wanting plays the major role in everybody's life--accident all the others. The only condition any of us can be sure of in this univer...
How many times have I gone back to the border of memory and peered into the darkness beyond? But it is not only memories that hover on the border. There are all sorts of phantasmagoria that inhabit that realm. The nightmares of a lonely child. Fairy ...
The New Age movement, for all the validity of its protest and the value of some of its recommendations, is in truth a very old blind alley. There is a very long history to remind us of what happens when nature is our ultimate point of reference . . ....
I keep seeing this ad on TV. It talks about teachers. Thank you for teaching me. Thank you for changing my life. They all look happy. Have they always been this happy? Did they have a perfect childhood? A perfect school life? I was happy once. But I ...
Putting his mouth close to her ear, he said, “I’m going to ride you raw, baby, but you won’t care. It’s going to feel so good, all you’ll be able to think about is getting me back inside you. Keeping me here, packed up tight and deep, screw...
