Real answers need to be found in dialogue and interaction and, yes, our shared human condition. This means being open to one another instead of simply fighting to maintain a prescribed position.
So much of the deep lingering sadness over President Kennedy's assassination is about the unfinished promise: unspoken speeches, unfulfilled hopes, the wondering about what might have been.
I've always hated being hemmed in or seeing anybody being hemmed in. Even when I was the smallest child, I couldn't bear being told I couldn't drink at a so-called white drinking fountain.
It was clear to me as a civil rights leader in the '60s that unless we put the social and economic underpinnings beneath the political and the civil rights, we wouldn't go anywhere.
Every child is innocent because it has not been tempted, but only when we have been tempted and have remained pure, or when we have fallen, repented and reformed, are we virtuous.
When blood is placed under a microscope, it appears as a number of minute globules or discs, but when seen by the trained clairvoyant as it courses through the living body, blood is found to be a gas, a spiritual essence.
When we realize that human beings are entering the world constantly and that each being is stamped at the first complete breath with the planetary pattern then in the sky, everyone must necessarily be different from everybody else.
Bizarrely, I actually feel safer the older I get, like people will expect less from me, and I can become more and more invisible, yet more and more eccentric.
As I am both lazy and forgetful, I can't take proper care of too many things. That's why I want to cherish properly the things I love.
My first three manuscripts were epic fantasy - like high fantasy - and then the fourth one was a historical fantasy about Mozart as a child. I still have a soft spot for that one!
When I first came over to the States, I started writing, I think, as a way to help myself learn English. I would start stapling together little booklets for myself.
Boys are different from girls, but boys are also different from other boys, just as girls are different from other girls. Calling a book 'for boys' or 'for girls' is well-meaning, but to me, not terribly helpful.
I've turned into a technological wizard. I can send emails now, which for me is unbelievable. They don't make any sense, but I can send them. I call it e-mithering.
I learned from my father how to swear right and how to string it together for optimum effect/affect. I use it like karate. I bring it out when it's needed.
On December 17, 1984, I had surgery to remove two inches of my left lung due to pneumonia. After two hours of surgery the doctors told my mother I had AIDS.
We're not handling things anymore before they arrive on our doorstep. I like to feel how thin porcelain can be, run my hand over a textile, see if I want to sit in a chair.
In design-speak, 'a library' means a room lined with books, floor-to ceiling, but it all depends on the space you have. You may have a free-standing bookshelf of your favorite books if that's all you have room for.
Buying found objects means repurposing something that was already made years before, sometimes decades before. It strikes a nice balance between the new and used equation we should strive for in our lives.
Some kids spent their allowance going to see 'Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom'; I spent mine on a great-looking lamp I'd found at the flea market and a ceramic bowl from a neighborhood garage sale.
Color is a very personal thing. You need to make sure to choose a color that makes you happy. But I don't recommend accent walls - choose a color you can live with on all four walls.
Before you begin designing or buying anything, you need to get real and ask yourself: What do you really want to use this room for? What do you want to do in this room but can't now?
