Collins and Morales represent a segment of society which, if attacked with the weapons society sanctions, one finds buffered by innumerable layers of law, bureaucracy, lies, evasions. They rest secure within their palaces, confident that they possess...
For me, walking in a hard Dakota wind can be like staring at the ocean: humbled before its immensity, I also have a sense of being at home on this planet, my blood so like the sea in chemical composition, my every cell partaking of air. I live about ...
He wondered if today was that day, if he’d wake up different, wake up someone else who remembered him fondly. A new Doctor. He wondered if he’d approve. Would he be more gentle? That might not be so bad. More vengeful? He hoped not. Maybe he’d ...
I am not an ape, I am a man. The world has been created by God. Man has been created by God. It is not possible for man to understand God - God understands God. Man is God and therefore understands God. I am God. I am a man. I am good and not a beast...
She had just realized there were two things that prevent us from achieving our dreams: believing them to be impossible or seeing those dreams made possible by some sudden turn of the wheel of fortune, when you least expected it. For at that moment, a...
Nicholas Benedict did have an exceptional gift for knowing things (more exceptional, in fact, than most adults would have thought possible), and yet not even he could know that this next chapter was to be the most unusual-and most important-of his en...
William: My brother has an appreciation of art, so I imagine the woman he chooses must be beautiful beyond the pale. Once he outgrows his current predilection with painting and accepts his family responsibilities, he'll need a wife who can move throu...
I want to write a book called, “Son, I’m dying,” where I visualize the day my estranged dad calls me out of the blue to tell me he is dying, and in as many ways as possible I’ll offer up various responses to that.
Planning is worrying, only in a productive, proactive form. Worry has to be a large element of planning, or else how could you project different possible scenarios, situations, outcomes, and probabilities, and then plot a course of action? A worry-fr...
As Ernest Becker observes in The Denial of Death, the very thought of disobeying authority appears to awaken the anxiety connected with the possible loss, during infancy, of parental love, respect or support. The unexamined beliefs and experiences th...
Never let failure discourage you. Every time you get to the base of a mountain (literal or metaphorical), you're presented with a new opportunity to challenge yourself, to push your limits beyond what you thought possible, to learn from climbers on t...
Women always said things like that, and it made him crazy. It's as if every conversation with a woman was a test, and men always failed it, because they always lacked the key to the code and so they never quite understood what the conversation was re...
Berlin was charismatic in the roguish way of a love... It was a lover who was a little dangerous in ways that didn't always show, keeping you a bit on edge, a bit in love and endlessly forgiving because he made her feel that she was exactly where she...
Rather than seek to be squired and dated by their rivals why should it not be possible for women to find relaxation and pleasure in the company of their 'inferiors'? They would need to shed their desperate need to admire a man, and accept the gentler...
I have lived through much, and now I think I have found what is needed for happiness. A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to th...
Marriage and family life give us constant opportunities to deny ourselves for the sake of others. And yet self-denial is not a mask for self-contempt, but the necessary means for achieving self-mastery; for self-mastery makes possible our self-giving...
You should go." "I can't." "Because you want to stare at the monster?" Alec's green eyes blaze, but with a wholly human fire now. "Or because you pity me?" I couldn't guess which possibility he loathes more. I fold my arms. "I can't leave because the...
Darwin himself said as much: 'If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find no such case.' Dar...
I don't understand humans." Caradoc shook his head. "It takes their brightest minds decades to plan an unmanned voyage to the nearest planet, which can take a year to travel each way. Yet they expect there to be aliens travelling distances it takes l...
I think all of us are looking for that which does not admit of bullshit . . . If you tell me you can bench press 450, hell, we'll load up the bar and put you under it. Either you can do it or you can't do it—you can't bullshit. Ultimately, sports a...
But does it make any sense at all to know that it ends badly for all of us, even the happiest of us, and that we all lose everything that matters in the end-and yet to know as well, despite all this, as cruelly as the game is stacked, that it's possi...
