Everything is impermanent. Every physical and mental experience arises and passes. Everything in existence is endlessly arising out of causes and conditions. We all create suffering for ourselves through our resistance, through our desire to have thi...
I’ve always felt almost human. I’ve always known that there’s something about me that’s different than other dogs. Sure, I’m stuffed into a dog’s body, but that’s just the shell. It’s what’s inside that’s important. The soul. And ...
The world we made together is gone now. Silk and cinnamon do not bring it back to me as clearly as the smell of potatoes frying with onions, or the purr of a cat, or the feel of a knot beneath my fingers. And that in itself is proof of how the voyage...
All through the short afternoon they kept coming, the people who counted themselves Father's friends. Young and old, poor and rich, scholarly gentlemen and illiterate servant girls—only to Father did it seem that they were all alike. That was Fathe...
Tam Lin says rabbits give up when they're caught by coyotes [...]. He says they consent to die because their animals and can't understand hope. But humans are different. They fight against death no matter how bad things seem, and sometimes, even when...
Go to a goddamn priest if you wanna be lied to. I've seen too many of your kind slip back inside to fool myself. If you wanna think you're a new man, hell, that's fine. But don't think you're looking any different in anyone else's mind.
Sometimes the effect arrives thanks to a different kind of breakthrough: a dramatic increase in our ability to MEASURE something, and an improvement in the tools we build for measuring. New ways of measuring almost always imply new ways of making.
Amnesia, which is a loss of memory, is a symptom of many different trauma and/or dissociative disorders, including PTSD, Dissociative Fugue, Dissociative Disorder Not Otherwise Specified and Dissociative Identity Disorder. Amnesia can affect both imp...
If I would have known I was going to leave my job that day to become a writer, I probably would have planned differently... It didn't come by way of illness per se, accident, or dismissal, but by way of sheer self-mutiny. The self I was born to be, d...
Teaching is different today. Teachers don’t just stand at the board and lecture while the kids take notes. What we’re ultimately teaching them is to teach themselves.
Drug addicts driven to crime to finance their drug addiction are not often inclined toward violent crime. Violence requires all different kinds of energy, and most drug addicts like to expend their energy not on their professional crime but on what t...
Besides, two kinds of people have the courage to make someone else's decisions: the hero, who comes to your rescue when you can't even cry out for help, and the tyrant. The only difference between them is the hero listens. As soon as you can talk, he...
Without imagination, we merely see or hear, and even if we see or hear that the objects of the senses are beautiful, we cannot feel that they are so. The difference is this: in feeling the beauty of objects, we enjoy not only the common, shared pleas...
Caroline had felt more comfortable thinking of beauty as something separate from her, like a scarf or a coat you could check before going in to a show. She wondered now, however, if she had treated more things as a part of herself rather than an acce...
I hadn't found out yet that mankind consists of two very different races, the rich and the poor. It took me ... and plenty of other people . . . twenty years and the war to learn to stick to my class and ask the price of things before touching them, ...
Death after all is only a matter of a few hours, a few minutes, but a pension is like poverty, it lasts a whole lifetime. Rich people are drunk in a different way, they can't understand this frenzy about security. Being rich is another kind of drunke...
There is, after all, no moral difference between the bigot and the tolerator. They are from case to case positive or negative. One man is bigoted because he was given the sword of truth, another because he is angered in thoughtlessness; then, one man...
One of the biggest contradictions in self-proclaimed open-mindedness is to say that we're all one but when a true bigot comes around tell him we're all different. It's usually the case that neither side is correct. One might have the right to do some...
My instincts told me that death would somehow be…different. But my rational mind reminded me that I had probably tempted fate one too many times. At least, I thought it was my rational mind. It sure seemed like the usual voice inside my head. Thank...
Do you really want to know where we come from?" she said. "In every century, in every country, they'll call us something different. They'll say we're ghosts, angels, demons, elemental spirits, and giving us a name doesn't help anybody. When did a nam...
Who knows? Maybe they’re right. Maybe we are driven crazy by our feelings. Maybe love is a disease, and we would be better off without it. But we have chosen a different road. And in the end that is the point of escaping the cure: We are free to ch...
