If our prayer is “Dear God, please use me to be of service,” then that is what we will be. And it is not for us to judge either the size or value of our gifts. Our job is to try to get out of the way, to defer to the spirit moving within us and b...
Every man, every woman, every child has some talent, some power, some opportunity of getting good and doing good. Each day offers some occasion for using this talent. As we use it, it gradually increases, improves, becomes native to the character. As...
What does a woman feel when she is hit? My mother slapped me when I was a child - on two occasions, to the point of pure hysteria; I never liked it. Those who are humiliated in such a way learn to disintegrate – that is, they become once removed fr...
As I grew into womanhood my confusion at the world became more apparent. I was taking comfort in behaviours that were familiar, not bathing, wearing multiple layers of clothes and, like my mother, I was bingeing on food. Of course I was still very mu...
Dwight Eisenhower said that from the beginning, his mother and father operated on an assumption that set the course of his life - that the world could be fixed of its problems if every child understood the necessity of their existence. Eisenhower's p...
Then he led her to sit by him on a fallen gum trunk, smooth and white, and he leaned to whisper in her ear. Transferred the secret he and her mother had kept for seventeen years. Waited for the flicker of recognition, the minute shift in expression a...
As a teacher of fourth-graders in a public school, where corporal punishement was not allowed, she had years of violence stored up and was, truth be told, sort of enjoying letting it out on Kona, who she felt could have been the poster child for the ...
One swing set, well worn but structurally sound, seeks new home ... With this swing set, your child(ren) will be introduced to the ups and downs of human life gently and safely, and may also learn the most important lesson of all: No matter how hard ...
I am a member of a fragile species, still new to the earth, the youngest creatures of any scale, here only a few moments as evolutionary time is measured, a juvenile species, a child of a species. We are only tentatively set in place, error prone, at...
There is a child - a baby - who long since kicked off her blankets. Her skin is ashen and her mouth open in a perpetual yet silent scream. She isn't old enough to roll over, to sit up, to climb. So she lies there kicking her fat legs against the foot...
Just as she was unaware of the hidden currents of politics running below the surface of College affairs, so the Scholars, for their part, would have been unable to see the rich seething stew of alliances and enmities and feuds and treaties which was ...
I think of that, too: her mind. Her brain, all those coils, and her thoughts shuttling through those coils like fast, frantic centipedes. Like a child, I picture opening her skull, unspooling her brain and sifting through it, trying to catch and pin ...
Sure, and fatherhood is super important too. I'm not trying to make this a women-only club by any means. Just that even men rarely view their role in child rearing as the most important thing they do, when in fact it is clearly the most important thi...
There was no helping her tears. For they would leave Po behind… She cried into his shoulder like a child. Ashamed of herself, for it was only a parting, and Bitterblue had not wept like this even over a death. ‘Don’t be ashamed,' Po whispered. ...
He knew one thing only, and it was beyond fear or reason: He was not going to die crouching here like a child playing hide-and-seek; he was not going to die kneeling at Voldemort’s feet . . . he was going to die upright like his father, and he was ...
Possibly, he was in a state of second growth and recovery, and was constantly assimilating nutriment for his spirit and intellect from sights, sounds, and events which passed as a perfect void to persons more practised with the world. As all is activ...
Whom wilt thou find to love ignoble thee Save Me, save only Me? All which I took from thee I did but take, Not for thy harms. But just that thou might'st seek it in my arms. All which thy child's mistake Fancies as lost, I have stored for thee at hom...
Fifteen-year-old girls produce children with sixteen-year-old boys in the backseat of cars and in the stairwells of apartment buildings. Why can't two loving adults who have contemplated parenthood and are prepared to offer love, patience, and devoti...
All through dinner Arturo and I held hands under the table like a couple of kids, and that made the dinner quite wonderful, even though Mrs. Fletcher kept staring at Olivia as though committing her to memory. It got so bad that Olivia turned to her h...
As she worked, she remembered something her parents had said to her when Klaus was born, and against when they brought Sunny home from the hospital. 'you are the eldest Baudelaire child,' they had said, kindly but firmly. 'And as the eldest, it will ...
It was snowing when I got off the bus at Flax Hill. Not quite regular snowfall, not exactly a blizzard. This is how it was: The snow came down heavily, settled for about a minute, then the wind moved it - more rolled it, really - onto another target....
