They arrived home again to a most peculiar sight. The small garden at the front of the Banana House had been transformed. A tidal wave of cushions, beanbags, quilts, hearth rugs, and sleeping bags appeared to have swept up the lawn and broken at the ...
In school I ended up writing three different papers on "The Castaway" section of Moby-Dick, the chapter where the cabin boy Pip falls overboard and is driven mad by the empty immensity of what he finds himself floating in. And when I teach school now...
Look at her good, Lily," she said, "'cause you're seeing the end of something." "I am?" "Yes, you are, because as long as people have been on this earth, the moon has been a mystery to us. Think about it. She is strong enough to pull the oceans, and ...
…I’m afraid of what the digital age will do to the world, to the things we think are important… it’s almost like people want to believe in some illusion that they’re robots and forget altogether that they’re real, living people… but eve...
In the letter he left for the coroner he had explained his reasoning (for suicide): that life is a gift bestowed without anyone asking for it; that the thinking person has a philosophical duty to examine both the nature of life and the conditions it ...
In those years before mobile phones, email and Skype, travelers depended on the rudimentary communications system known as the postcard. Other methods--the long-distance phone call, the telegram--were marked "For Emergency Use Only." So my parents wa...
A true recognition of God's sovereignty will avow God’s perfect right to do with us as He wills. The one who bows to the pleasure of the Almighty will acknowledge His absolute right to do with us as seemeth Him good. If He chooses to send poverty, ...
I’ve watched my dad move our family from extreme poverty to extreme wealth and then everywhere in between. Never once did I see or hear him be anything but a cheerleader for the accomplishments of others. It didn’t matter if he was down or up in ...
I did not have an answer for the maestro that day. Instead my answer has been the labor of my life, principally my Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livy but also my little Prince. Despite what so many say, I did not embark upon this voyage to ...
I watched her—the way her shoulders moved with the tilt of her head, how her smile lit up the six people around her, how her hair, tucked behind her ears, framed her face like baby’s breath. I thought about how the sound of her heart beating soun...
Aber auch Glück ist anstrengend. Ich finde nichts frustrierender, als neben einer auserwählten Person zu liegen und das Bedürfnis zu haben, ihr so nah wie möglich zu sein. Man kann sich umarmen und verknoten, bis man schwarz wird, man hat immer d...
As inexplicable as the accidents that set it off, our imagination is a crucial privilege. I've tried my whole life simply to accept the images that present themselves to me without trying to analyze them. I remember when we were shooting That Obscure...
It didn't help that I was never allowed to study anything remotely contemporary until the last year of university: there was never any sense of leading to . If anything, my education gave me the opposite impression, of an end to cultural history roun...
Three days a week she helped at the Manor Nursing Home, where people proved their keenness by reciting received analyses of current events. All the Manor residents watched television day and night, informed to the eyeballs like everyone else and rush...
Hing hang hung! the words rang faintly through his daydream like echoes of Miz Cunningham's tart little doorbell. Then he looked again at the old woman herself. Why, she was really quite wonderful - this old fat woman! In the end, she got her hands o...
Jesus Christ lived in the midst of his enemies. At the end all his disciples deserted him. On the Cross he was utterly alone, surrounded by evildoers and mockers. For this cause he had come, to bring peace to the enemies of God. So the Christian, too...
Everyone thinks that it was the big strong caveman who got the girl, and for the most part, that may have been true, but physical strength doesn't explain how our species created civilization. I think there was always some scrawny dreamer sitting at ...
Family," she announced. "They're the people in your life you don't get to pick. The ones that are given to you,as opposed to those you get to choose." "You're bound to them by blood," she continued, her voice flat. "Which, you know, gives you that mu...
A computer search would have given me a list of pertinent cases, but without that I had to read everything. That is harder by far, but you end up learning a lot more. I was forced to remember cases because making copies of everything was too expensiv...
Every time you look up at the stars, it’s like opening a door. You could be anyone, anywhere. You could be yourself at any moment in your life. You open that door and you realize you’re the same person under the same stars. Camping out in the bac...
From "Lady In Waiting" in the anthology The Morgue : Now I have yet to meet the corpse could hold up its end of a conversation, so at most I might whistle while fixin’ one up ‘stead of engagin’ myself in any small talk that’s goin’ to be so...