After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our b...
Marriage is a very strange thing. It’s a very public institution, it’s meant to tell the world that two people are going to live together, to declare that their children will be legal, that these children can inherit their property. It’s meant ...
Jesus said several times, “Come, follow me.” His was a program of “do what I do,” rather than “do what I say.” His innate brilliance would have permitted him to put on a dazzling display, but that would have left his followers far behind....
[What Rushdie took away from reading Gunter Grass's The Tin Drum]: Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets. Take a deep breath before you begin talking. Aim for the stars. Keep grinning. Be ruthless. Argue with the world. ...
At the very best, a mind enclosed in language is in prison. It is limited to the number of relations which words can make simultaneously present to it; and remains in ignorance of thoughts which involve the combination of a greater number. These thou...
Now that I have smelled you, I can face you down. Even though my body is shaking, I can keep a place free from you. I can feel you running round in my head, you see, but all the doors are closed to you now. I can control the dark inside, which is whe...
The first question they ask is: "Why was he eternally surprised?" And they were told: "Wen considered the nature of time and understood the universe is, instant by instant, re-created anew. Therefore, he understood, there is, in truth, no Past, only ...
What should I do about the wild and the tame? The wild heart that wants to be free, and the tame heart that wants to come home. I want to be held. I don't want you to come too close. I want you to scoop me up and bring me home at nights. I don't want...
Sometimes, life gets overwhelming. You feel pestered, overworked and unappreciated. Your vision becomes blurred and your dreams suddenly feel too far from reach. You feel wasted, even though you know you’ve come a long way. At that point, ALL YOU N...
An increasing number of people who lead mental lives of great intensity, people who are sensitive by nature, notice the steadily more frequent appearance in them of mental states of great strangeness ... a wordless and irrational feeling of ecstasy; ...
Thinking outside the box' is ridiculous nonsense, since whatever you can do in a 'box' or closed environment is not 'thinking'. If I 'think' about a problem but limit my thoughts to certain dimensions - then i am not thinking at all, because thinking...
Revolution and youth are closely allied. What can a revolution promise to adults? To some it brings disgrace, to others favor. But even that favor is questionable, for it affects only the worse half of life, and in addition to advantages it also enta...
Then Leo realized something was blocking the middle of his view. Something large and fuzzy, and so close, Leo had to cross his eyes to see it properly. It was a large, ugly face. "Holy mother!" he yelped. The face backed away and came into focus. Sta...
I think about going to the lake, but I'm so weak that I barely make it to my meeting place with Gale. I sit on the rock where Cressida filmed us, but it's too wide without his body beside me. Several times I close my eyes and count to ten, thinking t...
When I read poetry, I want to feel myself suddenly larger … in touch with—or at least close to—what I deem magical, astonishing. I want to experience a kind of wonderment. And when you report back to your own daily world after experiencing the ...
Unconsciously we all have a standard by which we measure other men, and if we examine closely we find that this standard is a very simple one, and is this: we admire them, we envy them, for great qualities we ourselves lack. Hero worship consists in ...
I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English―it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; don't let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in. When you catch an adjective, kil...
See, I know how they do. White folks like to stay in those books. They carry and they keep and they dig in their books, like nothing matters that don’t get written in some book somewhere. Like that’s the only way they can know for sure what happe...
To be acquainted today with the results of the public opinions on both sides- Palestinian–Israeli -, is a necessary and valuable attribute to the long term viability of the whole peace process. When both public opinions, Israeli and the Palestinian...
Let me see,” Opal said. She quickly slurped up the rest of her lunch and then took the collar. She examined it very closely. Sure enough, she could see bits of evergreen fur pinched along the buckle strap. As she looked closer, she noticed somethin...
In every single scenario that you step into, in life, it is like stepping into a body of water and you need to stop and really stand there to feel what's going on in that water— the temperature, the direction of the current, the particles in the wa...
