And still the brain continues to yearn, continues to burn, foolishly, with desire. My old man's brain is mocked by a body that still longs to stretch in the sun and form a beautiful shape in someone else's gaze, to lie under a blue sky and dream of h...
Yet rather than calling the earliest religions, which embraced such an open acceptance of all human sexuality, 'fertility cults,' we might consider the religions of today as strange in that they seem to associate shame and even sin with the very proc...
Quitting’s not hard. Deciding to quit is hard. Once you make that mental leap, the rest is easy.” “Really? Was that how you quit me?” And just like that, without thinking, without saying it in my head first, without arguing with myself for da...
I hate you, I thought, I hate you with your bloody nature-boy airs and your bloody forced-march voyage of bloody discovery. I wondered then if Finn's personality worked on everyone, or whether I had just the the right sort of mentality to fall in ste...
The words 'bad timing' came to be ghosts haunting our every move in Birmingham. Yet people who used this argument were ignorant of the background of our planning...they did not realize that it was ridiculous to speak of timing when the clock of histo...
Writers are great lovers. They fall in love with other writers. That's how they learn to write. They take on a writer, read everything by him or her, read it over again until they understand how the writer moves, pauses, and sees. That's what being a...
I remember when my aunt died, the thing that pissed me off the most was going to get groceries the next day and seeing all those people who didn't care... didn't understand why I was so upset when I saw her brand of cigarettes behind the counter.
If you were upset about an ugly pimple on the end of your nose, you might try to feel better by keeping your pimple in perspective. You might compare your pimple situation to that of someone who was being eaten by a bear, and when you looked in the m...
The boundaries we erect to divide heaven from earth, mind from matter, real from unreal are mere conveniences. Having made the boundaries, we can unmake them just as easily.
I don't think everyone wants to create the great American novel, but we all have a dream of telling our stories-of realizing what we think, feel, and see before we die. Writing is a path to meet ourselves and become intimate.
I can't take it anymore. The waiting. The wanting. Something inside me snaps. I hate myself. I hate that I have to deal with this. I hate my life. And I hate how I can't count on anyone to be completely there when I need them, exactly the way I need ...
If a girl starts out all casual with a guy and she doesn't tell him that she wants a relationship, it will never become a relationship. If you give the guy the impression that casual is okay with you, that's all he'll ever want. Be straight with him ...
God loves human beings. God loves the world. Not an ideal human, but human beings as they are; not an ideal world, but the real world. What we find repulsive in their opposition to God, what we shrink back from with pain and hostility, namely, real h...
While we exert ourselves to grow beyond our humanity, to leave the human behind us, God becomes human; and we must recognize that God wills that we be human, real human beings. While we distinguish between pious and godless, good and evil, noble and ...
My friends scoffed at my anxiety and said dumb things like, 'Fifty is the new forty!' Which just made me realize that there are a whole lot of other people who suck at math as bad as I do. No. Fifty is fifty.
Life has its rhythm ad we have ours. They’re designed to coexist in harmony, so that when we do what is ours to do and otherwise let life be, we garner acceptance and serenity. (285)
A twenty-three-year-long study in Ohio determined that people who saw growing older as something positive lived a whopping seven and a half years longer than those who didn’t. (356)
Every organized religion holds that certain behaviors, rituals, personalities, places, and/or books are sacred. These organized teachings are proper in their own place, but they are mere options for the one infused with devotion. To such a one, God i...
I've been quoting the book [on Peter Sutcliffe] constantly in rehearsals. Some members of the cast have stated their disapproval that it should even have been written. Some of the women have expressed more - disgust and anger. What are they saying? T...
The yogi can relate to his Beloved in the form of a personal relationship-as a friend, a child, a spouse. He can cherish God in traditional religious performances–honoring saints, holy sites, and scriptures. He can hold God dear in the form of unio...
When you can see your life in retrospect, the romanticism of how good things once were gives way to the reality that positives and negatives comprise every day and every decade. (235)
