Working in a hotel is the anti-coffee shop, because instead of it being a place that’ll wake you up, it’s a place to sleep. And it’s a place to have sex, which is something Starbucks frowns upon (though I’ve never seen anyone frown during sex...
Maybe the most sacred function of memory is just that: to render the distinction between past, present, and future ultimately meaningless; to enable us at some level of our being to inhabit that same eternity which it is said that God himself inhabit...
Memories are strange things. Withough being something I can hold in my hand, they wield a beguiling power over me. Like a mirage in the noontime heat of summer, they dance before my inner eyes and beckon me to find water where there is not water.
I don't think Harry cares about being forgiven," Poppy said glumly. "Of course he does. Men love to be forgiven. It makes us feel better about our inability to learn from our mistakes.
God's being good does not somehow magically make all Christians good.
Why do we spend so much of our limited time on this earth focusing on all the things that our eulogies will never cover?
And that's when I first learned about evil. It is built in to the very nature of the universe. Every world spins in pain. If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior.
As I have pointed out before, characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something e...
Einmal ist keinmal, says Tomas to himself. What happens but once, says the German adage, might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all.
The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum! What does this mad myth signi...
Tereza knew what happens during the moment love is born: the woman cannot resist the voice calling forth her terrified soul; the man cannot resist the woman whose soul thus responds to his voice.
To be a child means to owe one's existence to another, and even in our adult life we never quite reach the point where we no longer have to give thanks for being the person we are.
Only the Christian religion, which in its essence is communicated by the eternal child of God, keeps alive in its believers the lifelong awareness of their being children, and therefore of having to ask and give thanks for things.
God defines himself as "I am who I am", which also means: My being is such that I shall always be present in every moment of becoming.
It's hard to maintain a reputation for being grim and mysterious when you're accompanied by a brightly clad young thing, skipping merrily along at your side, holding your hand, and smiling sweetly on one and all.
This is the paradox of the power of literature: it seems that only when it is persecuted does it show its true powers, challenging authority, whereas in our permissive society it feels that it is being used merely to create the occasional pleasing co...
I don't see,' I said, 'how people stand being old. Your insides all dry up. When you're young you're so self-reliant. You don't even need much religion.
Communication is really a two-way process with listenining being as important as speaking. Enhancing one's listening skills is therefore as important as enhancing one's speaking skills.
In the end, perhaps we should simply imagine joke; a long joke that's being continually retold in an accent too thick and too strange to ever be completely understood. Life is that joke, my friends. The soul is the punch line.
We even commissioned a smaller pair of these statues for the baggage claim area in the regular lobby. Gives all those Normal conspiracy nuts something to talk about besides the Blue Mustang. They think our statues are the work of Masons or reptilian ...
The feel of him made her forget all of her troubles, all the decisions weighing on her. She wanted to trade every sky dive, every bungee jump, every outdoor risk, for the thrill of being with him. A willingness to risk it all overwhelmed her.
