You will come to know things that can only be known with the wisdom of age and the grace of years. Most of those things will have to do with forgiveness.
You don't have to justify your education by demonstrating its financial rewards. Anyone who expects you to has no sense of the arts.
My mother's last word to me clanks inside me like an iron bell that someone beats at dinnertime: love, love, love, love, love.
The place of true healing is a fierce place. It's a giant place. it's a place of monstrous beauty and endless dark and glimmering light.
Whatever happens to you belongs to you. Make it yours. Feed it to yourself even if it feels impossible to swallow. Let it nurture you, because it will.
If there is any society among robbers and murderers, they must at least. . . .abstain from robbing and murdering one another. So beneficence is less essential than justice is to the existence of society; a lack of beneficence will make a society unco...
Aucun des sophismes de la folie, - la folie qu'on enferme, - n'a été oublié par moi : je pourrais les redire tous, je tiens le système.
Once a restless or frayed mood has turned to anger, or violence, or psychosis, Richard, like most, finds it very difficult to see it as illness, rather than being willful, angry, irrational or simply tiresome.
By my existence I am nothing more than an empty place, an outline,that is reserved within being in general. Given with it, though, is the duty to fill in this empty place. That is my life.
You know what the doctor said to me to cheer me up?" Fat said. "There are worse diseases than cancer." "Did he show you slides?" We both laughed. When you are nearly crazy with grief, you laugh at what you can.
Fat realized that one of two possibilities existed and only two; either Dr. Stone was totally insane – not just insane but totally so – or else in an artful, professional fashion he had gotten Fat to talk; he had drawn Fat out and now knew that F...
Just tell me why; why the fucking why?" To which the universe would hollowly respond, "My ways cannot be known, oh man." Which is to say, "My ways do not make sense, nor do the ways of those who dwell in me.
In religious belief as elsewhere, we must take our chances, recognizing that we could be wrong, dreadfully wrong. There are no guarantees; the religious life is a venture; foolish and debilitating error is a permanent possibility. (If we can be wrong...
I have a remarkable ability to delete all better judgement from my brain when I get my head set on something. I have no sense of moderation, no sense of caution. I have no sense pretty much.
Laurel, David? Would you like to share the joke with the rest of the class?" he asked, one hand on his skinny hip. "No, sir," David said. "But thank you for asking." The students around them laughed, but Mr. james didn't look pleased. Laurel leaned b...
The law is that you must live in the house you have built. The law is absurd: it is written down nowhere. You are uncertain what crime is, though each life writhing to elude what it has made feels like punishment.
Science would not be what it is if there had not been a , a or a , any more than music would be what it is if , and had never lived. The world as we know it is the product of its geniuses—and there may be evil as well as beneficent genius—and to ...
There's no way to know what makes one thing happen and not another. What leads to what. What destroys what. What causes what to flourish or die or take another course.
Wilhelm Reich identified "armor" as the sum total of typical character attitudes, which an individual develops as a blocking against his emotional excitations, resulting in rigidity of the body, lack of emotional contact, "deadness". Functionally ide...
He felt like a brother of mine, but not at all like my actual brother. He seemed like someone I'd always know even if I never saw him again.
But now that she was dying, I knew everything. My mother was in me already. Not just the parts of her that I knew, but the parts of her that had come before me too.