As her vision flickered one last time, the man was gone; it was her mother looking into her eyes. Her mother’s eyes were filled with so much love that it seemed to release her from her pain and fear as it did when she was a small child. Her mother ...
Can you remember when you finished primary, how about when you passed matric, graduation day, your learner's & license, getting your first salary slip and the most valuable of them all; having your first child, walking down the isle and even buying y...
The one thing that I want every single child to have experienced at some point in their life, as part of their education, is to have some idea they hold to be true, and at the very basis of their being, proved to be wrong. Because that opens your min...
One may enter the literary parlor via just about any door, be it the prison door, the madhouse door, or the brothel door. There is but one door one may not enter it through, which is the child room door. The critics will never forgive you such. The g...
War is not two great armies meeting in the clash and frenzy of battle. War is a boy being carried on a stretcher, looking up at God’s blue sky with bewildered eyes that are soon to close; war is a woman carrying a child that has been injured by a s...
Something very beautiful happens to people when their world has fallen apart: a humility, a nobility, a higher intelligence emerges at just the point when our knees hit the floor. Perhaps, in a way, that's where humanity is now: about to discover we'...
Magnus glanced at Alec and raised his eyebrows "Boo", he said. Jace was grinning. "Come on,surely you've got a phobia or two. What scares you?" Alec thought for a moment. "Spiders," he said. Clary turned to Luke. "Have you got a spider anywhere?" Luk...
But playing your music as loud as you want and coming home drunk aren't real life. Real life, it turns out, is diapers and lawnmowers, decks that need painting, a wife that needs to be listened to, kids that need to be taught right from wrong, a chec...
I kept glancing at her animated face, scrunched up as though imitating an adult. I got hit with that overwhelming feeling. It sneaked up on me. Parents get it from time to time. You are looking at your child and it is an ordinary moment, not like the...
A mother has far greater influence on her children than anyone else, and she must realize that every word she speaks, every act, every response, her attitude, even her appearance and manner of dress affect the lives of her children and the whole fami...
It will be your duty...to estimate her (as you choose her) by the qualities she has, and not by the qualities she may not have. The latter you must develop in her, if you can. And if you cannot, child, you must just accustom yourself to do without 'e...
God gave a choice to Adam and Eve to eat the fruit which caused death and pain to all mankind. How is that different than allowing a choice regarding abortion? A person may make the choice to end one life but god allowed a choice that impacts every m...
As a child, my mother told me not to talk to strangers. I did my best to obey. She hadn’t realized that everyone is a stranger to the part of us that makes us who we truly are. The part of us that prays for the rest in ways we cannot comprehend. In...
Tethered to the universe by tendrils of history, with threads of continuity descending to God knows where, I see that I'm more than the dust I'll become." This quote is from my novel, "Whispers from St. Mary's Well." Many readers have said that, like...
I never heard weeping like that before or after; not from a child, nor a man wounded in the palm, nor a tortured man, nor a girl dragged off to slavery from a taken city. If you heard the woman you most hate in the world weep so, you would go to comf...
Fables should be taught as fables, myths as myths, and miracles as poetic fancies. To teach superstitions as truths is a most terrible thing. The child mind accepts and believes them, and only through great pain and perhaps tragedy can he be in after...
On our way back to her house, I didn’t look at the city lights any longer. I looked into the sky and felt as if the moon was following us. When I was a child, my grandmother told me that the sky speaks to those who look and listen to it. She said, ...
The doctor's wife wasn't a bad woman. She was sufficiently convinced of her own importance to believe that God actually did watch everything she did and listen to everything she said, and she was too taken up with rooting out the pride she was prone ...
If you knew your potential to feel good, you would ask no one to be different so that you can feel good. You would free yourself of all of that cumbersome impossibility of needing to control the world, or control your mate, or control your child. You...
You have described only too well," replied the Master, "where the difficulty lies...The right shot at the right moment does not come because you do not let go of yourself. You...brace yourself for failure. So long as that is so, you have no choice bu...
In 1736 I lost one of my sons, a fine boy of four years old, by the small-pox, taken in the common way. I long regretted bitterly, and still regret that I had not given it to him by inoculation. This I mention for the sake of parents who omit that op...
