The real difference between God and human beings, he thought, was that God cannot stand continuance. No sooner has he created a season of a year, or a time of the day, than he wishes for something quite different, and sweeps it all away. No sooner wa...
In the end, therefore, money will be the one thing people will desire, which is moreover only representative, an abstraction. Nowadays a young man hardly envies anyone his gifts, his art, the love of a beautiful girl, or his fame; he only envies him ...
…I interviewed ordinary people about prayer. Typically, the results went like this: Is Prayer important to you? Oh, yes. How often to you pray? Every day. Approximately how long? Five minutes – well, maybe seven. Do you sense the presence of God ...
And when she started becoming a “young lady,” and no one was allowed to look at her because she thought she was fat. And how she really wasn’t fat. And how she was actually very pretty. And how different her face looked when she realized boys t...
Anyone who lives in her own world is crazy. Like schizophrenics, psychopaths, maniacs. I mean people who are different from others.' Like you?' On the other hand,' Zedka continued, pretending not to have heard the remark, 'you have Einstein, saying t...
They said she killed herself.Everyone was saying It. What started out as a rumor, quietly whispered among small gatherings of polite people, quickly grew into something that was openly discussed in a large gatherings of impolite people. I was so sick...
Our words are often only vague, inadequate descriptions of our thoughts. Something gets lost in translation every time we try to express our thoughts in words. And when the other person hears our words, something gets lost in translation again, becau...
The different religions confused me. Which was the right one? I tried to figure it out but had no success. It worried me. The different Gods - Catholic, Jewish, Protestant, Mohammedan - seemed very particular in the way in which they expected me to k...
An evolutionary perspective of our place in the history of the earth reminds us that Homo sapiens sapiens has occupied the planet for the tiniest fraction of that planet's four and a half thousand million years of existence. In many ways we are a bio...
Why does the writer write? The writer writes to serve — hopelessly he writes in the hope that he might serve — not himself and not others, but that great cold elemental grace which knows us. A writer I very much admire is Don DeLillo. At an award...
It seems to me that the greatest triumph of any human rights movement, be it fighting for racial, religious, sexual or gender equality – is to achieve that moment where eyes are opened so wide that a sort of blindness sets in. I don’t care if som...
And here lies the crux of the matter: to say that nature is personal may mean not so much seeing the world differently as acting differently -- or, to state it another way, it may mean interacting with more-than-human others in nature as if those oth...
Before criticize common-known thieves severely, think for a while that maybe you are thief, too. Believe me, there is no special distinctive feature that enables us to determine who is a thief. Only the way to earn your bread can determine it. So at ...
Think of this – that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other. True, the writer may have been alone also with Spenser's golden apples in the Faerie Queene, Proserpina's garden, glistening bright among t...
Father Dominic Moran: Priest: "I want to know whether your intent is just purely to commit suicide here." Bobby Sands: Bobby Sands: "You want me to argue about the morality of what I'm about to do and whether it's really suicide or not? For one, you'...
But whenever I say that I will do this or that, it looks very different when the time comes.
With the Smithies, it was different. There was sometimes no telling where one of them began and the others left off.
Perhaps the depth of love can be calibrated by the number of different selves that are actively involved in a given relationship.
But to mourn, that's different. To mourn is to be eaten alive with homesickness for the person.
College towns [are] all the same in that way; same burger, different wrapper.
The only difference between a grown-up's mistake and a child's is the size of the consequence.
