He had always wanted to write music, and he could give no other identity to the thing he sought. If you want to know what it is, he told himself, listen to the first phrases of Tchaikovsky’s First Concerto--or the last movement of Rachmaninoff’s ...
I imagined the Augustus Waters analysis of that comment: If I am playing basketball in heaven, does that imply a physical location of a heaven containing physical basketballs? Who makes the basketballs in question? Are there less fortunate souls in h...
Forgiveness. The frail beauty of the world takes root in me as I make my way back through the woods, past the caves and the ravine, where the earth has accepted the flesh of the deer, leaving nothing but a bone or two, peeking above Kartik's makeshif...
You come to this place, mid-life. You don’t know how you got here, but suddenly you’re staring fifty in the face. When you turn and look back down the years, you glimpse the ghosts of other lives you might have led; all houses are haunted. The wr...
The way sadness works is one of the strangest riddles of the world. If you are stricken with a great sadness, you may feel as if you have been set aflame, not only because of the enormous pain, but also because your sadness may spread over your life,...
You have worked to build me what I asked for all the days of our lives. Even when the task seemed impossible, even when it would have been easier to give it up, you did not, but kept on going. You have kept me warm in winter, and cool in summer. You ...
Be patient and wait for God to direct your path. God loves you. He has a plan and a purpose for your life. The purpose of every Christian's life is to work out their salvation, but as God has lovingly created each of us with unique features and attri...
If you sit down and think about it , you come up with some very funny ideas. Like: why make people inquisitive, and then put some forbidden fruit where they can see it with a big neon finger flashing on and off saying 'THIS IS IT!'? ... I mean, why d...
And the great owners, who must lose their land in an upheaval, the great owners with access to history, with eyes to read history and to know the great fact: when property accumulates in too few hands it is taken away. And that companion fact: when a...
Not only is it a wholly remarkable book, it is also a highly successful one – more popular than the Celestial Home Care Omnibus, better selling than Fifty-three More Things to do in Zero Gravity, and more controversial than Oolon Colluphid's trilog...
Roman ignored her and took her ankles and flipped them purposefully, but because of her hands she could not turn all the way and ended up with her legs scissored unintuitively, and suddenly things were different. Ashley had heard girls tell stories o...
Beannacht / Blessing On the day when the weight deadens on your shoulders and you stumble, may the clay dance to balance you. And when your eyes freeze behind the grey window and the ghost of loss gets in to you, may a flock of colours, indigo, red, ...
Just as when we step into a mosque and its high open dome leads our minds up , up , to greater things , so a great carpet seeks to do the same under the feet .Such a carpet directs us to the magnificence of the infinite , veiled , yet never near , cl...
Everybody has a soul." I turn to Pelly. "And that means you, too." "I'm not so sure of that," he says. "What does it feel like?" "Having a soul?" I look at Maxine, but she only shrugs. "I don't know," I tell Pelly. "I don't have anything to compare i...
Her first really great role, the one that cemented the “Jean Arthur character,” was as the wisecracking big-city reporter who eventually melts for country rube Gary Cooper in Frank Capra’s Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936). It was the first of thre...
A demigod!" one snarled. "Eat it!" yelled another. But that's as far as they got before I slashed a wide arc with Riptide and vaporized the entire front row of monsters. "Back off!" I yelled at the rest, trying to sound fierce. Behind them stood thei...
USURY: Everybody's looking for the job in which you never have to pay anyone their pound of flesh. Self-employed nirvana. A lot of artists like to think of themselves as uncompromising; a lot of management consultants won't tell you what they do unti...
All other trades are contained in that of war. Is that why war endures? No. It endures because young men love it and old men love it in them. Those that fought, those that did not. That's your notion. The judge smiled. Men are born for games. Nothing...
As I mentioned briefly on the phone, the best thing about the Air Chrysalis is that it's not an imitation of anyone. It has absolutely none of the usual new writer's sense of 'I want to be another so-and-so'. the syle, for sure, is rough,and the writ...
Because . . . most of us think that the point is something to do with work, or kids, or family, or whatever. But you don't have any of that. There's nothing between you and despair, and you don't seem a very desperate person.' 'Too stupid.' 'You're n...
And I wished I could believe him. I wished with all that I had. And when you're eleven, you're on the cusp between still believing wishing worked if you wanted something hard enough and understanding the world is teeth and sharp edges. I wished. I di...
