You could try and understand people, you could read books and understand words and concepts and ideas, but you could never understand enough or have enough knowledge to keep away the surprises that both fate and human beings had in store.
My father had taught me to be nice first, because you can always be mean later, but once you've been mean to someone, they won't believe the nice anymore. So be nice, be nice, until it's time to stop being nice, then destroy them.
Young people are inept at love; it is like being given a flying machine, and you leap inside, ready to set off as you've always dreamed, yet you don't have the first notion of how to make it start, much less how to make it move.
Traditions that cease to evolve render themselves irrelevant or obsolete. And what's the problem with inventing new performance practices? Are customs being slandered? Do successful alternative diminish the value of traditional ones? *The argument th...
I spent most of my youth hauling sides of beef and pork to my father's shop. Carrying you is far more enjoyable." "How sweet," Annabelle mumbled sickly, her eyes closed. "Every woman dreams of being told that she's preferable to a dead cow.
The earl shook his head, exhibiting a degree of frosty offense that could only be achieved by an aristocrat whose wishes had just been gainsaid. “I’ve never heard of a man being so eager to confess to the parent of a girl he’s just ruined,” h...
It still hurts, but life is supposed to hurt. Too many people think life is supposed to be easy and perfect all the time. But there is always some hurt. It's part of being alive. You have to accept it's a piece that every single person carries. It's ...
Take any two-year-old through a car wash and their skulls are blown. FLAPS! FOAM! ROLLING THINGS! It's the closest they'll ever get to being inside a working spaceship.
The second rat, of course, may have been the first rat farther uptown, in which case I am either being followed or the rat keeps the same rounds and hours I do. I think sanity, however, is the most profound moral option of our time. Two rats, then.
Far from being the smartest possible biological species, we are probably better thought of as the stupidest possible biological species capable of starting a technological civilization - a niche we filled because we got there first, not because we ar...
...I told her that letting go is not a choice, in many ways. You try to move on, perhaps. But it comes of its own accord, in the end; it happens when it is ready to, and it mostly comes by without announcement or being noticed at all. , I tell her.
This kind of beauty softens you and expands you, which is good, but of course it makes you vulnerable to all sorts of horrible things, like, oh, feelings. And being in your body.
We have lived for too long in a world, and tragically in a Church, where the wills and affections of human beings are regarded as sacrosanct as they stand, where God is required to command what we already love, and to promise what we already desire.
[G]reat stories communicate simple truths that reflect the poetic dimensions of the human soul. Not only do powerful characters help us understand our lives, their stories reflect our core values as human beings.
Loghain shook his head in disbelief. "Maker's breath, man, aren't you suppose to have some dignity? Somewhere?" "Me? Dignity?" "Being the supposed future King and such." "I think Rowan took my dignity." She snorted derisively, folding her arms. "Ther...
It was the challenge of life too, was it not? People could never be fully understood. They were ever changing, different people at different times and under different circumstances and influences. And always growing, always creating themselves anew. ...
According to Tobias, women hang around longer because they’re less capable of indignation and better at being humiliated, for what is old age but one long string of indignities? What person of integrity would put up with it?
That's a spiritual lifestyle, being willing to admit that you don't know everything and that you were wrong about some things. It's about making a list of all the people you've harmed, either emotionally or physically or financially, and going back a...
I like trains. I like their rhythm, and I like the freedom of being suspended between two places, all anxieties of purpose taken care of: for this moment I know where I am going.
The idea of not being a kid anymore terrifies me. I am an adult and I have been hurled out of the world of boys and girls into the fray of men and women, and expected to function as a grown-up when I never functioned very well as a kid.
Paul was terribly personal. The books I like are the ones that make you feel like you are with a person who is being quite vulnerable, telling you all sorts of stuff that is personal, and that's the thing Paul did that makes me like him.
