The soul of us is never confused about why it is here. It only asks us to wake up and see the breadcrumb clues it has been leaving all along. It asks us to have courage to face the wounds we have been hiding, allow it to heal them and untangle the he...
One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will change outer r...
Michael: [walks in Elliot's room and sees E.T. in a dress; he chuckles] What's all this shit? E.T.: E.T. phone home. Michael: [astonished] My God, he's talking now. E.T.: Home. Elliot: E.T. phone home? E.T.: [points to window] E.T. phone home. Elliot...
Ray Charles: I hear like you see. Like that hummingbird outside the window, for instance. Della Bea Robinson: [astonished] I can't hear her. Ray Charles: You have to listen. Della Bea Robinson: [closes her eyes, hears the hummingbird] Yes! Ray Charle...
Technician: [presenting Hawking with the speech-generating device] Welcome to the future. Stephen Hawking: [speaks for the first time] My name is Stephen Hawking... Jane Hawking: [astonished] It's American! Technician: Is that a problem? Jane Hawking...
There is a payoff for examining the divine author's literary style. It will tell you something about Him. Whereas, Jonah's actions are extensively described and laboriously detailed, God's reactions (although miraculous) are only described in sparse,...
What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of ...
There is a feeling the body gives the mind of having missed something, a bedrock poverty, like falling without the sense that you are passing through one world, that you could reach another anytime. Instead the real is crossing you, your body an arri...
For my own part I would as soon be descended from that heroic little monkey, who braved his dreaded enemy in order to save the life of his keeper; or from that old baboon, who, descending from the mountains, carried away in triumph his young comrade ...
Montag shook his head. He looked at a blank wall. The girl's face was there, really quite beautiful in memory: astonishing, in fact. She had a very thin face like the dial of a small clock seen faintly in a dark room in the middle of a night when you...
Tolstoy does not tell us how things look to the author; he tells us how they look to the characters. In short, he does not use simile and metaphor. (That astonishing assertion in Wood’s review is what got me started reading Tolstoy in the first pla...
If you would only stop rating a child’s ability by your own; and try to find out just what ability a child has, our young folks throughout this big world would show a surprisingly willing disposition to try things which would bring your approbation...
For in grief nothing "stays put." One keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round. Everything repeats. Am I going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a spiral? But if a spiral, am I going up or down it? How often -- will it b...
Mr. Moony presents his compliments to Professor Snape, and begs him to keep his abnormally large nose out of other people's business. Mr. Prongs agrees with Mr. Moony, and would like to add that Professor Snape is an ugly git. Mr. Padfoot would like ...
You have savings?" she was astonished. As a woman who lived on the very extreme edges of her budget, whose credit card bills were a source of monthly concern, the idea of savings was just so alien. But then this was Ed, a different kind of person alt...
I don't know,' he said irritably. 'Is it meant to improve you?' She swiveled toward him, eyes wide with shock. 'Because nothing could,' he added. Her mouth dropped in astonishment. Blotchy scarlet rushed her complexion. One would have thought he'd sh...
Without the errors which are active in every psychical pleasure and displeasrue a humanity would never have come into existence--whose fundamental feeling is and remains that man is the free being in a world of unfreedom, the external miracle worker ...
And when your sorrow is comforted (time soothes all sorrows) you will be content that you have known me. You will always be my friend. You will want to laugh with me. And you will sometimes open your window, so, for that pleasure . . . And your frien...
Belief in the traditional sense, or certitude, or dogma, amounts to the grandiose delusion, "My current model" -- or grid, or map, or reality-tunnel -- "contains the whole universe and will never need to be revised." In terms of the history of scienc...
They were beyond the present, outside time, with no memories and no future. There was nothing but obliterating sensation, thrilling and swelling, and the sound of fabric on fabric and skin on fabric as their limbs slid across each other in this restl...
Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups... So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded wi...