At length, when I considered it, I realized that the best of my actions were small things. Picking flowers and cooking food for my mother when she had been unwell, spending an afternoon with the children, sending money to my sister or kissing Henry�...
A sunset, almost formidable in its splendor, would be lingering in the fully exposed sky. Among its imperceptibly changing amassments, one could pick out brightly stained structural details of celestial organisms, or glowing slits in dark banks, or f...
In a Zen retreat we have a format for working with these quicksilver changes: we sit with them, we pay attention to them... Being steady with mindfulness as an anchor for all the changes we go through is the way we practice forbearance. And you can e...
Once upon a time there were two countries, at war with each other. In order to make peace after many years of conflict, they decided to build a bridge across the ocean. But because they never learned each other’s language properly, they could never...
It's not my story anymore: whenever I speak about the past now, I feel as if I were talking about something that has nothing to do with me. All that remains in the present are the voice, the presence, and the importance of fulfilling my mission. I do...
Why be seduced by something as small as a front door in another country? Why fall in love with a place because it has trams and its people seldom have curtains in their homes? However absurd the intense reactions provoked by such small (and mute) for...
The mind cannot fall asleep as long as it watches itself. Only when the mind moves unwatched and becomes absorbed in images that tug it as it were to one side does self-consciousness dissolve and sleep with its healing, brilliantly detailed fictions ...
I am no Muslim scholar proclaimed by any institution, but I can think and command myself with discerning mental ability. What you will read on my page has no praises for intellectual manipulation of any Mullah whose view is to instill hate in your he...
If these Mount Everests of the financial world are going to labor and bring forth still more pictures with people being blown to bits with bazookas and automatic assault rifles with no gory detail left unexploited, if they are going to encourage anxi...
Roy Neary: Is that it? Is that all you're gonna ask me? Well I got a couple of thousand goddamn questions, you know. I want to speak to someone in charge. I want to lodge a complaint. You have no right to make people crazy! You think I investigate ev...
[Marge is interviewing the two hookers whose clients were the two suspects] Hooker No. 1: Well, the little guy was kinda funny-lookin'. Marge Gunderson: In what way? Hooker No. 1: I dunno... just funny-lookin'. Marge Gunderson: Can you be any more sp...
Earl McGraw: Well, give me the gory details, Son Number One. Edgar McGraw: It's a goddamn massacre, Pop. They wiped out the whole wedding party, execution-style. Earl McGraw: Give me a figure. Edgar McGraw: Nine dead bodies. And we're talking the who...
[Lindsay sees the nuclear warhead] Lindsey Brigman: You know, you've got some huevos bringin' that thing into my rig. With all that's going on up in the world you bring a nuclear weapon IN HERE? Lt. Coffey: Mrs. Brigman... Lindsey Brigman: Does this ...
…I am certain of this one truth: men can achieve closeness without intimacy, while women can achieve intimacy without closeness. For example, Bobbie knows every intimate detail of her dental hygienist’s private life. She doesn’t have a close re...
The brain, he writes, is like Kublai Khan, the great Mongol emperor of the thirteenth century. It sits enthroned in its skull, "encased in darkness and silence," at a lofty remove from brute reality. Messengers stream in from every corner of the sens...
Hence the detail which interests me is not, or at least is not strictly intentional, and probably must not be so; it occurs in the field of the photographed thing like a supplement that is at once inevitable and delightful; it does not necessarily at...
I love you more. I love you enough to let you go and live your dream." I tilted my head and shrugged. "Don't you see....? I love you more." He smiled softly and I brushed some hair off his forehead. Running the backs of my fingers down his cheek, I w...
Mister Cameron - I have read the unexpurgated Ovid, the love poems of Sappho, the Decameron in the original, and a great many texts in Greek and Latin histories that were not though fit for proper gentlemen to read, much less proper ladies. I know in...
I was not brought up to know the Earth in intimate detail. No one I can remember from my childhood ever suggested that the land I lived on and was surrounded by contained anything important to me. My sense of kinship was connected to my house, my bed...
Anything approaching the change that came over his features I have never seen before, and hope never to see again. Oh, I wasn't touched. I was fascinated. It was as though a veil had been rent. I saw on that ivory face the expression of sombre pride,...
The novelist Dumas would one day borrow features from both of his uncles, not to mention his grandfather, the acknowledged scoundrel, in fashioning the central villains of The Count of Monte Cristo. Reading court documents detailing the sordid unrave...
