My first real kiss came when I was 10, and it was in an acting class. I had to do a scene from a movie where someone gets kissed under a tree, and I did not want to do it! But my acting partner wanted me to feel comfortable, so he bought a picnic bas...
[Salvation] is a life-changing experience when it happens, and if our life isn’t changed by it, then it either didn’t happen at all or we are so caught up in this world, spending so much time, effort, and emotion on the red circle, that we are ig...
And yet, because I am without a doubt mortal, I have the troubling desire to do good, to please, to communicate my warmth, to still be very beautiful sometimes to inspire a taste for beauty. I know that these times are not fertile in grace...I am afr...
Grace abounds in contemporary movies, books, novels, films and music. If God is not in the whirlwind, He may be in a Woody Allen film, or a Bruce Springsteen concert. Most people understand imagery and symbol better than doctrine and dogma. Images to...
Before the war Sofya Levinton had once said to Yevgenia Nikolaevna Shaposhnikova, 'If one man is fated to be killed by another, it would be interesting to trace the gradual convergence of their paths. At the start they might be miles away from one an...
I had enough of a story churning in my head that combined all the elements of the day—the interview, the concert, the after-party’s private session—when he put his guitar away and asked me if I had ever experimented with homosexuality. Talk abo...
Right now, all white people are either wearing or coveting a pair of Ray-Ban Wayfarer sunglasses. These sunglasses are so popular now that you cannot swing a canvas bag at a farmer's market without hitting a pair. In fact, at outdoor gatherings you s...
When I heard of the shady tactics of the Moonies, my initial indignation was modified by empathy. I remembered only too well all the innocuous-sounding "fronts" operated by Evangelicals in order to witness to sinners, e.g., coffee houses, concerts, p...
Narrator: [introducing Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor] What you will see are the different things that might pass through your mind if you sat in a concert hall listening to this music. At first, you are more or less conscious of the orchestra. ...
If we focus our efforts on doing, we will always fall short of our real potential. We can do all the right things, but if we do not do them for the right reasons, they will never have the power to change our internal view of life.
Edna restored the toffee to the centre of her tongue and sucking pleasurably, resumed her typing of Naked Love by Armand Levine. Its painstaking eroticism left her uninterested--as indeed it did most of Mr. Levine's readers, in spite of his efforts. ...
Musicians add to songs and they evolve: For as was true of human effort, there was never advancement. Everything added meant something lost, and about as often as not the thing lost was preferable to the thing gained, so that over time we'd be lucky ...
Mahon's wife stared down at us. Her hands went to her hips. "Which one of you idiots wants to explain to me what the hell is going on?" With great effort I raised my arm and pointed in Mahon's general direction. "Him.
People die all the time. Life is a lot more fragile than we think. So you should treat others in a way that leaves no regrets. Fairly, and if possible, sincerely. It's too easy not to make the effort, then weep and wring your hands after the person d...
Sadness and boredom were more bearable than the effort of living a normal life. Perhaps the idea of death began to hover over her during that period, as a kind of higher order of lassitude in which she would not have to move the blood in her veins or...
I hoisted myself onto my elbows. "Yeah, well, if I ever come back as a Grigori, then I'll kick your ass." "You'll come back, and you'll be a Grigori." He spoke with such certainty it made me smile. "I doubt very greatly, however, that you'll kick my ...
Right words are born in courage, which results from our struggle to make sense of our various predicaments. Cheer is what words are "trying to tell us/... It's native to the words/and what they want us always to know/even when it seems quite impossib...
Real talent harnesses what it has and unlocks what it doesn’t. There is natural ability, there is the discipline that develops natural ability, there is the unending study of one’s craft, and there is the exponential lifting of performance by the...
How often ... do we pass by a need, a life that could be changed with the smallest bit of effort? And it's not that we don't care but that we're driving so fast, all we see are the fence posts flashing by on the side of the highway? Maybe the first s...
I suppose the best way to tell the story is simply to narrate it, without an effort to carry belief. The thing did not require belief. It was not a feeling of horror in one's bones, or a misty outline, or anything that needed to be given actuality by...
Ah," she cried, "you look so cool." Their eyes met, and they stared together at each other, alone in space. With an effort she glanced down at the table. You always look so cool," she repeated. She had told him that she loved him, and Tom Buchanan sa...
