A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living': so too with the biography of that self. And just as lives don't stay still, so life-writing can't be fixed and finalised. Our ideas are shifting about what can be said, our knowledge of hum...
May the economic discrimination you impose on your own people bloat your mind. That polluted rubbish occupying your mind-set needs to be swept clean. May the disgusted look you impose on those you judge poor burn your eyes. That evil look occupying y...
Life is full of all sorts of setbacks and twists and turns and disappointments. The character of this team will be how well you will come back from this letdown, this defeat. You could still be a great team and you can still accomplish great things a...
Avoid trivial pursuits. You are a child of God, destined for glory, and called to do great things in His Name. Do not waste your life on hobbies, sports, and other recreational pursuits. Do not throw away the precious moments of your life on entertai...
Reason is overrated. Many pundits have argued that a good heart and steadfast moral clarity are superior to triangulations of overeducated policy wonks, like the best and brightest and that dragged us into the quagmire of Vietnam. And wasn't it reaso...
The world put's too much emphasis on what a person does in terms of monetary value and social status as opposed to who they are. If I was to ask you if you would be loved for who you are or what you do (eg. your occupation), I would guess that you wo...
Tyrants are willing to commit to anything…including mass murder to maintain their domination over every human being alive. They abuse the lives of the people they are entrusted with by the perverse dictates that they, themselves, would never live b...
When my brother,…, was a young boy learning the Chinese classics, I was in the habit of listening with him and I became unusually proficient at understanding those passages that he found too difficult to grasp and memorize. Father a most learned ma...
Progress is the exploration of our own error. Evolution is a consolidation of what have always begun as errors. And errors are of two kinds: errors that turn out to be true and errors that turn out to be false (which are most of them). But they both ...
If you are writing a story, miracles or abnormal events may be bad art, or they may not. If, for example, you are writing an ordinary realistic novel and have got your characters into a hopeless muddle, it would be quite intolerable if you suddenly c...
In order to write a memoir, I’ve sat still inside the swirling vortex of my own complicated history like a piece of old driftwood, battered by the sea. I’ve waited—sometimes patiently, sometimes in despair—for the story under pressure of conc...
He had a book to finish. Ten-thousand words. The other ninety thousand had been difficult. This last tenth seemed impossible. His plot had become derailed. He was unable to see his way through the smoke and coke dust of a mythical railway track that ...
If these Mount Everests of the financial world are going to labor and bring forth still more pictures with people being blown to bits with bazookas and automatic assault rifles with no gory detail left unexploited, if they are going to encourage anxi...
All obstructions to the execution of the laws, all combinations and associations, under whatever plausible character, with the real design to direct, control, counteract, or awe the regular deliberation and action of the constituted authorities, are ...
You will and should do everything in your power to improve your actual writing skills. You’ll work hard to create characters that are compelling and unforgettable. But in the end, it’s the story that matters. Don’t ever let the other stuff get ...
Lt. Col. Frank Slade: [Lt. Col. Frank Slade is speaking in defense of Charlie Simms at meeting at the Baird School] Now I have come to the cross-roads in my life. I always knew what the right path was. Without exception, I knew, but I never took it. ...
Want something else more than success. Success is a lovely thing, but your desire to say something, your worth, and your identity shouldn’t rely on it, because it’s not guaranteed and it’s not permanent and it’s not sufficient. So work hard, ...
That said, pointing out inaccurate or unrealistic portrayals of women to younger grade school children-ages five to eight-does seem to be effective, when done judiciously:taking to little girls about body image and dieting, for example, can actually ...
After that, all the while Millie was eating the pudding... we both tore Christopher's character to shreds. It was wonderful fun.... He drove everyone mad in Chrestomanci Castle by insisting on silk shirts and exactly the right kind of pajamas. 'And h...
I have been taunted on various platforms recently for becoming a neo-conservative, and have been the object of some fascinating web-site and blog stuff, from the isolationist Right as well as from the peaceniks, who both argue in a semi-literate way ...
’s discovery would not have been possible without the doctrine of conics. Now contemporaries of —such penetrating minds as and —were abandoning the study of geometry ... because they said it was so UTTERLY USELESS. There was the future of the h...