We watch them grow, with sadness and amazement and fear. We have stepped away, but not entirely away. They know this. They sense it. We are no longer here, but we are not yet gone. And we will be like that for the rest of their lives. We watch, and t...
As if grabbed by strong arms that were not there, he felt himself being lifted. Raising skyward and spinning, he fought to regain orientation. The winds were holding him and carrying him higher. Spinning him sickeningly, senses askew, his focus was b...
Once again, it seemed, I was discovering the truth of the rule, a rule I'd never explicitly formulated to myself, but whose veracity I'd quite often sensed in a vague sort of way, which was that the chances of seeing an idea through to completion are...
The gramophone record, the musical thought, the score, the waves of sound, all stand to one another in that pictorial internal relation, which holds between language and the world. To all of them the logical structure is common. (Like the two youths,...
I lay in bed that night, a first-time drunkard at seven years of age, pondering the punishment I knew would arrive on callused palms. In the forest, as if sensing my plight, wolves howled nocturnal laments. The magnificent lunar lullabies of my lupin...
If we push on, we begin to feel a vague, tingling sense of who, or what, we really are. It's a powerful feeling, strong enough to have us coming back for more, again and again.
Owners, the way they blackballed me from baseball, the way they used me, in a sense, and then the way they wanted to send a signal to the other players, saying, you know, we're going to get Jose Canseco out of the game. This is a cue or a message for...
Television screens saturated with commercials promote the utopian and childish idea that all problems have fast, simple, and technological solutions. You must banish from your mind the naive but commonplace notion that commercials are about products....
She was tough in the best sense of the word. She'd taken blows, the disappointments, and had worked her way through them. Some people, he knew, would have buckled under, found a clutch, or given up. But she had carved a place for herself and made it ...
Is the beauty myth good to men? It hurts them by teaching them how to avoid loving women. It prevents men from actually seeing women. It does not, contrary to its own professed ideology, stimulate and gratify sexual longing. In suggesting a vision in...
Many people are calling Manti Te’o “dumb” or “naïve” because he fell for the “invisible girlfriend” hoax or catfishing but when you think about it. Religion MIGHT be doing the same thing when it tells you that there is a “God” that...
Religion begins in story. Yes, it does, because religion is an attempt to make sense of what is incomprehensible to us, what is inexplicable, what is awe-inspiring, what is frightening, what moves us to great wonder, and so on. That is the religious ...
It was wrong to capture wild animals and confine them in captivity for people to go and gawk at them. And that's basically how zoos got started. But once you do that, and once you have animals that have been bred in captivity, you're really stuck wit...
A true heterosexual never has a problem with gay people, gay people sense he is into pussy and only into pussy. That’s why I can’t abide homophobes, deep down they fear their little secret will one day be exposed, picked up by a very reliable gay...
What Darwinian theory shows us is that all human races are extremely close to each other. None of them is in any sense ancestral to any other; none of them is more primitive than any other. We are all modern races of exactly equal status, evolutionar...
If you're an actor, there's going to be a sense of fantasy about yourself, especially in the celebrity world we live in today. You give the illusion of being in control, sexy, at ease, with never a difficult moment. Those are the basic lies that all ...
Nature is a language and every new fact one learns is a new word; but it is not a language taken to pieces and dead in the dictionary, but the language put together into a most significant and universal sense. I wish to learn this language--not that ...
I don't write a play from beginning to end. I don't write an outline. I write scenes and moments as they occur to me. And I still write on a typewriter. It's not all in ether. It's on pages. I sequence them in a way that tends to make sense. Then I w...
Definitely, there is a sense in my writing that people now know me in a personal way. And to an extent, that's true because I write about very personal things, and I use the personal often to contextualize some of these sociopolitical issues that we'...
Scientist’s intellect is their ship as they navigate through the treacherous waters of detail where, hopefully, their good sense and rationale leads them to truth. Religious leaders already have the truth and those tenants that are not well-defined...
If you couldn't sense heat, you'd not be alive. And if that heat never grew uncomfortable, you would never move. And if you were stagnant—unchallenged by unpredictable flares—you would never grow capable of shielding yourself from harsher flames....
