When you’re alive, you don’t dwell on how you’re going to spend your time once you’re dead. You just figure you’re gone, and the rest will pretty much take care of itself. Or you think you’re not really going to die. You’re going to be ...
What a strange revelation of self-esteem it is when people only love those who think and feel as they do - an extension of themselves, in fact! Even Christianity does not cure us, since one cannot feel right without assuming that the rest must be wro...
When I walked into the Christian section of a bookstore, the message was clear: Faith is something you do alone. Rick does not have much tolerance for people living alone. He’s like Bill Clinton in that he feels everyone’s pain. If Rick thinks so...
It comforts me to think that if we are created beings the thing that created us would have to be greater than us, so much greater, in fact, that we would not be able to understand it. It would have to be greater than the facts of our reality and so i...
Cultural wisdom says 'Don't quit your day job.' Yet I think these desires represent our psyche's stretch toward wholeness. And to be whole, as many religious tranditions teach, is to make manifest a unique face of God in the world. We don't want to b...
Some sample lyrics I think I catch: "My engine races up to seventh gear; wrap your legs around my engine, dear . . . . The tunnel's dark, but the ground is wet; I lubricate it with my dripping sweat!" Or, something vaguely disturbing and gross like t...
If I've got a Dad, and his name is Wormwood Rot, and he's in some heavy metal rock band called Grave Dirt . . . then I'm definitely meeting him! She stares at me awkwardly, and I'm about to ask again—maybe even insist—when she says, "Honey, why d...
I think the act of reading imbues the reader with a sensitivity toward the outside world that people who don't read can sometimes lack. I know it seems like a contradiction in terms; after all reading is such a solitary, internalizing act that it app...
The store of fairy tales, that blue chamber where stories lie waiting to be rediscovered, holds out the promise of just those creative enchantments, not only for its own characters caught in its own plotlines; it offers magical metamorphoses to the o...
My brothers’ faces haunt me. I hear their children, my nieces and nephews, asking me why I came home without their daddies. I think of their wives, imagine their questions. Our parents, forever seeing the faces of their lost sons when they look at ...
[H]e could see the island of Manhattan off to the left. The towers were jammed together so tightly, he could feel the mass and stupendous weight.Just think of the millions, from all over the globe, who yearned to be on that island, in those towers, i...
A handwritten letter carries a lot of risk. It's a one-sided conversation that reveals the truth of the writer. Furthermore, the writer is not there to see the reaction of the person he writes to, so there's a great unknown to the process that requir...
Something snapped into my thinking then. Told is something that has been, something that is, and something that will be. Told was a noun and a verb. He was an active author. He was Told, he is Told, and he will be Told forever. Only we were in a time...
You'd think family would be the one sure thing in life, the gimme? Points you got just for being born? So much thick, meaty stuff bound you to these people, so many interlocking spirals of history, genetics, common cause, and struggle that it should ...
Someone once told me that life wasn't fair...and they were right. But I don't think that life was ever meant to be fair or perfect. It's not the tragedy, it's how we deal with it. It's whether we come out stronger because of it. It's not about blocki...
What are you thinking?” he asked in a disarmingly gentle tone. “That the city looks different depending on whom I’m seeing it with.” He nodded easily, as if this same thought had occurred to him. “I notice different things,” I continued. ...
Sometimes," Jem said, "our lives can change so fast that the change outpaces our minds and hearts. It's those times, I think, when our lives have altered but we still long for the time before everything was altered-- that is when we feel the greatest...
I think that’s what we are all meant to do, all we can do, with the gifts we have been given, be they experiences or talents. Those gifts are waiting to be used to touch others’ lives, as we patiently listen for and obediently follow the directio...
You look lousy,' he said. Jace blinked. 'Seems an odd time to start an insult contest, but if you insist, I could probably think up something good.' 'No I mean it. You don't look good.' 'This is from a guy ho has all the sex appeal of a penguin. Look...
I adore Wilkie Collins,” Tessa cried. “Oh—Armadale! And The Woman in White … Are you laughing at me?” “Not at you,” said Will, grinning, “more because of you. I’ve never seen anyone get so excited over books before. You’d think th...
Luke opened the pizza box and, finding it empty, shut it with a sigh. "Though you did eat all the pizza." "I only had five slices," Simon protested, leaning his chair backward so it balanced precariously on its two back legs. "How many slices did you...
