Okay. Scrabble, donuts, flowers, corndogs, pre-pubescent British wizards and indie music. Am I missing anything important?” She’s still blushing and it’s like the heat in her face is trapping all the words inside of her. “What is it?” I ask...
Sleeping is terrifying. When you close your eyes and surrender your consciousness to the void, you lose yourself—voluntarily—and you're trustingly assuming you'll find yourself back out of the labyrinth again. Usually you do. But sometimes you do...
It must be one of life’s little jokes... how we take everything, even life itself, for granted. We waste our childhoods wishing for what we don’t have, longing for the future, dreaming of ways to speed the time so we can hurry up and see the worl...
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...
The first time you share tea with a Balti, you are a stranger. The second time you take tea, you are an honored guest. The third time you share a cup of tea, you become family, and for our family, we are prepared to do anything, even die.
We fitted together like the two halves of an oyster-shell. I was Narcissus, embracing the pond in which I was about to drown. However much we had to hide our love, however guarded we had to be about our pleasure, I could not long be miserable about a...
The compelling thing about making art—or making anything, I suppose—is the moment when the vaporous, insubstantial idea becomes a solid , a thing, a substance in a world of substances. Circe, Nimbue, Artemis, Athena, all the old sorceresses: they...
If life was perfect,how in the hell would v evr learn to depend on someone other dn ourselves?If anything,dt’s wat life’s taught me.D need to b perfect is stemmed in d very belief dt it’s actually something v cn achieve.Self-actualization —do...
Look, part of the whole technique of disempowering people is to make sure that the real agents of change fall out of history, and are never recognized in the culture for what they are. So it's necessary to distort history and make it look as if Great...
If you perceive a world where there are separate images and you still feel a charge about anything, that is the indicator that you want to ask for Help. Lord, help me today. I am determined to see. Help me to see. That is where the openness and the h...
Boy or girl? I had never thought about that. The men who work at the palace, they use words to govern the country and use strength to protect it. Bringing all kinds of brilliant men from the kingdom, and they all have amazing talents. But...how are t...
Sometimes events that lead us bereft of anything but grief just happen for no reason other than happenstance--a car turns left instead of right, a train is missed, a call comes too late--and the real test of our humanness is whether, in light of that...
The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable. It is a deep aesthetic passion to rank with the finest that music and poetry can deliver. It is truly one of the things that m...
She imagined herself both queen and slave, dominatrix and victim. In her imagination she was making love with men of all skin colors--white, black, yellow--with homosexuals and beggars. She was anyone's, and anyone could do anything to her. She had o...
Ian's eyes settled on him, his expression grim. He bypassed everything, coming to a stop in front of the nervous young male. “I want all of your medicines to relieve fever, including liquids and capsules. Plus, I want a thermometer, the best one yo...
We're very near a certain point where money doesn't mean anything... They say: How much money is this going to cost? This is really a totally meaningless concept. Money determines less and less our reality. Money is not constant factor, it's simply a...
…I’d let those entering (grad) students in on my secret—higher education is all about perseverance. It has nothing to do with smarts or creativity or anything else. It’s about cultivating the willingness and stamina for hoop jumping. Jump thr...
I have received no assurance that anything we can do will eradicate suffering. I think the best results are obtained by people who work quietly away at limited objectives, such as the abolition of the slave trade, or prison reform, or factory acts, o...
Outside, the ocean was crashing, waves hitting sand, then pulling back to sea. I thought of everything being washed away, again and again. We make such messes in this life, both accidentally and on purpose. But wiping the surface clean doesn't really...
I hadn't said goodbye. It had been easier, like always, to just disappear, sparing myself the messy details of another farewell. Now, my fingers hovered over my track pad, moving the cursor down to his comment section before I stopped myself. What wa...
This meditation is called nontheistic, which doesn't have anything to do with believing in God or not believing in God, but means that nobody but yourself can tell you what to accept and what to reject. The practice of meditation helps us to get to k...
