Whenever I saw her, I felt like I had been living in another country, doing moderately well in another language, and then she showed up speaking English and suddenly I could speak with all the complexity and nuance that I hadn't realized was gone. Wi...
Sports programs are an important part of young people’s lives but should never over-shadow the true purpose of high school and that is to earn a diploma. So often today sports have become more important than an education. This must be remedied beca...
I felt the presence of the night all about me: a living, breathing entity, whispering soft words against my flesh. I had never before felt the silken touch of the night caress me as I did now. It was a frightening, yet exhilarating experience. ...
If anyone had a right to lecture people about their sin, it was the sinless son of God. If even he could meet sinners as equals, how much more should we Christians---all sinners ourselves---treat as equals the people we encounter in our lives?
My choices, it seemed, were to be branded a sinner and live my life alone; to abandon my faith, the one thing I held most dear in the entire world; or to lie to everyone, pretend I was straight, and forget about it all.
I was terrified of my weakness, of my sharp tongue, of my every flaw. I was terrified that this moment, my chance to live in happiness for however short a time we may have had, would be ruined because I was simply not carved out of the same wood as h...
We are victims of censorship within when we do not let ourselves think the thoughts which our flesh recoils from, or let conscience speak that which the heart feels to be unacceptable, or when we give ourselves excellent reasons for not participating...
Did you say the stars were worlds, Tess?" "Yes." "All like ours?" "I don't know, but I think so. They sometimes seem to be like the apples on our stubbard-tree. Most of them splendid and sound - a few blighted." "Which do we live on - a splendid one ...
Charlie Wind once told me we must keep the animals on Earth, for they know everything: how to keep warm, predict the storms, live in darkness or blazing sun, how to navigate the skies, to organize societies, how to make chemicals and fireproof skins....
Nature's silence is its one remark, and every flake of world is a chip off that old mute and immutable block. The Chiense say that we live in the world of ten thousand things. Each of the ten thousand things cries out to us precisely nothing.
In the end,” Callum said, his voice soft, gentle, “it all comes back to you. You protect them [your pack], you love them, you live for them, and someday, you die. That’s what it means, Bryn-girl, to be what we are [to be Alpha]. It’s lonely. ...
The basements of the churches I've loved reveal the foundation of the spiritual life to be not belief so much as engagement with the mystery lurking at the base of all things. We build a framework on top of mystery because we need someplace to live, ...
The hardest task for the historian… is to consider the evidence without prejudice. We all have prior agendas and tend to find what we’re looking for while ignoring anything contrary to our expectations. So history, because it is a human pursuit, ...
The way I remember it the tribe got paid some huge amount." "That's what they said to him. He said, What can you pay for the way a man lives? He said, What can you pay for the way a man is? They didn't understand.
Everyone has a right to love the land that gave them the things they need to live. It gives them beauty to look at, and food to eat, and neighbors to bicker with and then eventually to marry. But I think... that your own devotion to your familiar hom...
Cultural legacies are powerful forces. They have deep roots and long lives. They persist, generation after generation, virtually intact, even as the economic and social and demographic conditions that spawned them have vanished, and they play such a ...
There are moments in our lives when we summon the courage to make choices that go against reason, against common sense and the wise counsel of people we trust.
Faey lived, for those who knew how to find her, within Ombria's past. Parts of the city's past lay within time's reach, beneath the streets in great old limestone tunnels: the hovels and mansions and sunken river that Ombria shrugged off like a forgo...
What if you could just invent your family, your home, your life? You could. You could call Sunday Wednesday. Be awake and living at 3 a.m. Use T-shirts instead of sheets. Eat lettuce like an apple. Blow your nose on socks. Take four unrelated people ...
This was a vagrant of sixty-five, who was going to prison for playing the flute; or, in other words, for begging in the streets, and doing noting for his livelihood. In the next cell, was another man, who was going to the same prison for hawking tin ...
Prayer is essentially the practice of the presence of God, and that is the road to Heaven. There is no alternative. God is the only game in town. All other roads are dead ends. Since we must give our all to the one true God, we must not give any part...
