The author points out strikingly different reactions to calamity. While many passengers of a devastating shipwreck were thankful to be alive, future presidential assassin Charles Guiteau saw his being spared as proof of his exceptionalism rather than...
You know what the best part of the stars is?" "What's that?" "They're the same no matter what sky you're standing under. I mean...yeah, they might move or look like they're in a different place, but they're the same stars." "Yeah? So?" "So even if yo...
Now I have a guy trying to change me and I don’t want to be changed, yet I keep hanging in there, hoping that he learns to like what he sees. Isn't that the prime definition of insanity, repeating the same thing over and over and expecting a differ...
I feel obligated to point out, though, that I have always been a sucker for ideas I find aesthetically pleasing. The cosmic sweep of the thing - an interstellar kula chain - affirming the differences and at the same time emphasizing the similarities ...
Although teachers do care and do work very, very hard, the institution is psychopathic-it has no conscience. It rings a bell and the young man in the middle of writing a poem must close his notebook and move to a different cell where he must memorize...
The thing that drew them to her was the thing that had made all of them come to Sexton in the first place: they were all outsiders, people on the fringe. And no one, it seemed, understood this better than Suz. She turned her difference into a source ...
He spiked the dirt, twisted out the deformed rose, tossed it aside. His palms sweated. 'Sorry,' Persephone suggested. 'Pardon?' She murmured, 'You should say sorry when you kill something.' It took him a moment to realize she meant the rose. 'It was ...
At the moment, it's simply a difference of opinon between the Doctor and you.. You both want the best. You've only tried to kill him a couple of times... I mean, don't worry about that. I've seen people do much worse to him and at the end of the day ...
Matthew kept hinting that his desire - for blood, chiefly- was so strong that it put everything else at risk. But vampires weren’t the only creatures who had to manage such strong impulses. Much of what qualified as magic was simply desire in actio...
Your self-confidence is simply the part of your brain that tells you whether or not you should try something different or new or believe in yourself, and just as a Jedi truly believes that it is within their power to control their thoughts and stay i...
It´s a good thing when a man is different from your image of him. Is shows he isn´t a type. If he were, it would be the end of him as a man. But if you can´t place him in a category, it means that at least a part of him is what a human being ought...
It is a big deal to work with people who are different from you. And if you're white or of a higher class,no matter what race you are, you'll probably mess up. Maybe get yelled at. But there are worse things. Like keeping your dignity safe at home, w...
Hmph. Even the animals deserted me. I’d have deserted me, too, a different inner voice inserted dryly. The way I banged around in here wanting to kill something—anything—if only it would bring Aislinn back to me. Fionn understood at a level bey...
Christian scholars often say that Sufi theories are close to those of Christianity. Many Moslems maintain that they are essentially derived from Islam. The resemblance of many Sufi ideas to those of several religious and esoteric systems are sometime...
There is a distinct difference between the ability to create life and the innate need to protect it; to cherish it. The life you've created is the one being you love most in the universe, and that intense love evolves into something that goes far bey...
If one divided all of human science into two parts - the one common to all men, the other particular to the learned - the latter would be quite small in comparison with the former. But we are hardly aware of what is generally attained, because it is ...
Even if we’ve never been inside a synagogue or a mosque or a church—even if we have, and vowed never to go back—deep down in our striving hearts, beneath all the ambition and the fear, we suspect that we were made for a different sort of life.
[Saint Anthony] said, in his solitude, he sometimes encountered devils who looked like angels, and other times he found angels who looked like devils. When asked how he could tell the difference, the saint said that you can only tell which is which b...
I have no nostalgia for the patriarchy, please believe me. But what I have come to realize is that, when that patriarchic system was (rightfully) dismantled, it was not necessarily replaced by another form of protection. What I mean is--I never thoug...
The materialist theory of history, that all politics and ethics are the expression of economics, is a very simple fallacy indeed. It consists simply of confusing the necessary conditions of life with the normal preoccupations of life, that are quite ...
Parents have this twisted belief that anyone under the age of about twenty simply can’t know what love is, like the age to love is assessed in the same way the law assesses the legal age to drink. They think that the ‘emotional growth’ of a tee...