I told you in the course of this paper that Shakespeare had a sister; but do not look for her in 's of the poet. She died young--alas, she never wrote a word. She lies buried where the omnibuses now stop, opposite the Elephant and Castle. Now my beli...
Far to our left I could see a commercial airliner on final approach to Soekarno-Hatta. Far to our right I could see the outline of tall city buildings. The imagery was hard to ignore. In the midst was an impoverished world filled with dangerous radic...
Reality has a way of bursting the bubble of illusion, and an affair is one of the biggest illusions that anyone can experience in life. It’s based almost entirely on emotions with almost no logic to support it. That fact becomes clear when children...
Everywhere he went he saw this same phenomenon—parents unmindful of their children, their attention fixed on little glass windows in the palms of their hands, mesmerized like drug addicts, longing for some artificial connection while their own fles...
On Saturday afternoons I used to go for a walk with my mother. From the dusk of the hallway, we stepped at once into the brightness of the day. The passerby, bathed in melting gold, had their eyes half-closed against the glare, as if they were drench...
For Children: You will need to know the difference between Friday and a fried egg. It's quite a simple difference, but an important one. Friday comes at the end of the week, whereas a fried egg comes out of a chicken. Like most things, of course, it ...
Rosy lifted her arm, tried to say something, then pointed at the cafe, held her head, covered her mouth and—humiliation of humiliations—she began to cry. Right there in the street. “I’m so confused,” she said but it came out as a great honk...
I don't want to live in a world where the strong rule and the weak cower. I'd rather make a place where things are a little quieter. Where trolls stay the hell under their bridges and where elves don't come swooping out to snatch children from their ...
Children, awkward, isolate, their bodies crammed to bursting with caffein and sugar and pop music and cologne and perfume and hairgel and pimple cream and growth hormone-treated hamburger meat and premature sex drives and costly, fleeting, violent su...
Much of what I have done is left unfinished- not because I left it too soon, not because I was lazy, but because it had a life of it's own that continues without me. Children, I suppose, are always unfinished business: they begin as part of your own ...
He’d never wanted kids. Outside of priority boarding on an airline, he couldn’t see the upside to them. They took over your life and filled you with terror and weariness and people acted like having one was a blessed event and talked about them i...
The idea of a personal God who protects us, loves us, and then punishes us by not allowing us into Heaven, but instead casts us into Hell for eternity if we haven’t met his standards of living, is so outlandish that it can only be taught to childre...
I fear you will never arrive at an understanding of God so long as you cannot bring yourself to see the good that often comes as a result of pain. For there is nothing, from the lowest, weakest tone of suffering to the loftiest acme of pain, to which...
We could choose to be a nation that extends care, compassion, and concern to those who are locked up and locked out or headed for prison before they are old enough to vote. We could seek for them the same opportunities we seek for our own children; w...
Chapter 4,‘Organised abuse and the pleasures of disbelief’, uses Zizek’s (1991) insights into cite political role of enjoyment to analyse the hyperbole and scorn that has characterised the sceptical account of organised and ritualistic abuse. T...
God has prepared for Himself one great song of praise throughout eternity, and those who enter the community of God join in this song. It is the song that the “morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy” at the creation o...
There it was before her - life. Life: she thought but she did not finish her thought. She took a look at life, for she had a clear sense of it there, something real, something private, which she shared neither with her children nor with her husband. ...
Albine now yielded to him, and Serge possessed her. And the whole garden was engulfed together with the couple in one last cry of love's passion. The tree-trunks bent as under a powerful wind. The blades of grass emitted sobs of intoxication. The flo...
So long as there shall exist, by virtue of law and custom, decrees of damnation pronounced by society, artificially creating hells amid the civilization of earth, and adding the element of human fate to divine destiny; so long as the three great prob...
Life has loveliness to sell, All beautiful and splendid things, Blue waves whitened on a cliff, Soaring fire that sways and sings, And children's faces looking up Holding wonder like a cup. Life has loveliness to sell, Music like a curve of gold, Sce...
When Doris had died so long ago, it was weeks before Mary could think clearly and remember what she was supposed to do the next minute and then the minute after that. Even though Doris had shown Mary how to get rid of the chiggers that burrowed under...