A person who has resolved to ‘think positive’ must constantly scan his or her mind for negative thoughts – there’s no other way that the mind could ever gauge its success at the operation – yet that scanning will draw attention to the prese...
El mar era Carlos Vives desde que nos escapamos tres días a una playa desierta en Cozumel. Lo miraba tratando de recuperar algo. ¿Qué sería mejor? Tanto tuvimos. ¿Por qué no la muerte?, me preguntaba, si hasta los días que pasamos en el mar re...
It seemed like a matter of minutes when we began rolling in the foothills before Oakland and suddenly reached a height and saw stretched out ahead of us the fabulous white city of San Francisco on her eleven mystic hills with the blue Pacific and its...
One hundred fifty years is not long in the reckoning of a hill. But to a man it's long enough. One hundred fifty years is a week end to a redwood tree, but to a man it's two full lifetimes. One hundred fifty years is a twinkle to a star, but to a man...
I love music. For me, music is morning coffee. It's mood medicine. It's pure magic. A good song is like a good meal-I just want to inhale it and then share a bite with someone else.
Food is, for me, for everybody, a very sexual thing and I think I realised that quite early on. I still cannot exaggerate how just putting a meal in front of somebody is really more of a buzz for me than anything. And I mean anything. Maybe that goes...
If I was lonely, if I was afraid of being alone, then why abandon myself? Why run to someone else looking to give myself the thing that only I could give? I wanted to escape myself because I felt empty, and the emptiness frightened me. But obviously,...
I was always asking myself why. Why am I feeling this? Thinking that if I knew the cause I could find the cure. But of course there was no reasonable why, at least not in the present. I was awash in an accumulation of past feelings and future dreads,...
...A person who is headstrong enough to open their eyes and their heart to the full depth and weight of the world is inviting in everything out there - both evil and good, both dark and light, and the sheer bravery of that openness enables them to ga...
The sign of a good leader is easy to recognize, though it is hardly ever seen. For the greatest leaders are those who share as equals in the trials and struggles, the demands and expectations, the hills and trenches, the laws and punishments placed u...
The truly terrible thing about the war spirit, about the fear and hate hysteria it generates, is that it forces us to think and talk and feel in terms of abstractions—those "communists" this time, those "fascists" last time. But those we are fighti...
I don't really believe in elegance. Ever since I first came to France many years ago to do the Chambre Syndicale course, I always felt I was somehow lacking, first of all being British - obviously a disaster! But I was also puzzled with this idea tha...
...what I'm getting at is like the distinction between tourist and a traveler. The tourist experience is superficial and glancing. The traveler develops a deeper connection with her surroundings. She is more invested in them -- the traveler stays lon...
If I know a song of Africa, of the giraffe and the African new moon lying on her back, of the plows in the fields and the sweaty faces of the coffee pickers, does Africa know a song of me? Will the air over the plain quiver with a color that I have h...
All of us somehow felt that the next battleground was going to be culture. We all felt somehow that our culture had been stolen from us – by commercial forces, by advertising agencies, by TV broadcasters. It felt like we were no longer singing our ...
We got rich by violating one of the central tenets of economics: thou shall not sell off your capital and call it income. And yet over the past 40 years we have clear-cut the forests, fished rivers and oceans to the brink of extinction and siphoned o...
Every day Fu-shee, the smaller children, and I fan out in the hills around Green Dragon to strip trees of their bark and leaves, dig up roots and search for wild grass. We'll eat anything, and we have. But you can't eat a leather belt like it's a cri...
After the satyrs filed in to dinner, the Hermes cabin brought up the rear. They were always the biggest cabin. Last summer it had been led by Luke, the guy who fought with Thalia and Annabeth on top of Half-Blood Hill. For a while, before Poseidon ha...
Evolution is a blind giant who rolls a snowball down a hill. The ball is made of flakes—circumstances. They contribute to the mass without knowing it. They adhere without intention, and without foreseeing what is to result. When they see the result...
Knowledge is fundamental to all human achievements and progress. It is both the key and the quest that advances mankind. The search for knowledge is what brought men to the moon; but it took knowledge already acquired to make it possible to get there...
I suppose we'll never know what really happened in that room, though he did tell police, "I did it because I'm a dirty dog." This is not a very convincing alibi. He may as well have said, "I got 99 problems, but a bitch ain't one.
