Words could betray you if you chose the wrong ones, or mean less if you used too many. Jokes could be grandly miscalculated, or stories deemed boring, and I'd learned early on that my sense of humor and ideas about what sorts of things were fascinati...
You mean something like ‘truth or dare’? I haven’t played that in a long time.” She didn’t think he would ever get himself entangled in a game like that, but it was addictive, a compromising icebreaker featuring all the strategy of Poker, m...
Over the years the Indian leadership, and the educated Indian, have deliberately projected and embellished an image about Indians that they know to be untrue, and have wilfully encouraged the well-meaning but credulous foreign observer to accept it. ...
Persuading everyone to behave decently to each other because the society is so fragile is a worthy goal, but it may be more straightforward just to make the societies less fragile, which means developing their economies.
No, war will not be stopped. But it is a comfort, in the midst of a war, to read an antiwar book this good, and be reminded that just because something keeps happening, doesn't mean we get to stop regretting it. Massacres are bad, the death of innoce...
If the statue engulfs people in fire, we should send Leo.’ ‘I love you too, man.’ ‘You know what I mean. You’re immune. Or, heck, give me some of those nice water grenades and I’ll go. Ares and I have tangled before.
No one can make you dwell on the past. Control your thoughts and actions! Make your own decisions! Just because someone keeps bringing up your past doesn’t mean you have to accept it --- you are not obligated to accommodate their recollections of y...
But now I understand something more fully that I once only understood abstractly. I see how utterly ridiculous it is to think that the state can be the right means to help those who are poor or living at the margins of society. The state is their ene...
Son, make this world a better place with that beautiful mind of yours. And when you have a family of your own, love them beyond measure even when it means letting them be free to do what God intends them to do.
Living did not mean one joy piled upon another. It was merely the hope for less pain, hope played like a playing card upon another hope, a wish for kindness and mercies to emerge like kings and queens in an unexpected change of the game. One could ho...
Living did not mean one joy piled upon another. It was merely the hope for less pain, hope played like a playing card upon another hope, a wish for kindnesses and mercies to emerge like kings and queens in an unexpected change of the game. One could ...
Our approach to reality, our sense of reality, cannot assume that the text of nature, the book of life, is a cryptogram concealing just a single meaning. Rather, it is an expanding riddle of a multiplicity of resonating images.
He’d never actually been in a room with an insane person. Someone who asked questions they thought they already knew the answers to, or someone who asked, just to hear an answer they could disagree with. Sometimes, it was neither and they only want...
Not that she means anything by it, he knows. This is simply her lifelong habit of moderation at work, her need to tamp everything down to the routine, the modest, the tepid everyday. He understands the whole concept of boundaries, but there’s a poi...
But they love each other," Clary said, appalled. "Isn't that what love means? That you're supposed to be there for the other person to turn to, no matter what?" Luke looked toward the river, at the dark water moving slowly under the light of the autu...
The blood of Heaven binds you," said the Queen. "Blood calls to blood, under the skin. But love and blood are not the same." "Riddles," Clary said angrily. "Do you even mean anything when you talk like that?" "He is bound to you," said the Queen. "Bu...
I want to look my best for God. So many people have the attitude that if you're a Christian you've got to dress bad, wear an old color, not do anything to your hair, have nothing. It's no wonder that Christianity is not very attractive. I mean, how m...
I'm trying to take more nothing time - and that means sacrificing doing. It's partly to do with age, partly to do with the fact that writing takes up a lot of space in your head. My ideal is to go back to when I was a child. My life is quieter than i...
I'm constantly snatching my books out of the hands of precocious ten-year-olds who are simply too young to read them, despite parents insisting that dear Octavia has a reading age of 28. I remember trying to read 'In Cold Blood' at the age of twelve,...
A lot of people fear death because they think that so overwhelming an experience has to be painful, but I've seen quite a few deaths, and, with one exception, I've never known anyone to undergo anything like agony. That's amazing when you think about...
For a lot of people, well-meaning teaching has made poetry seem arcane, difficult, a kind of brown-knotting medicine that might be good for you but doesn't taste so good. So I tried to make a collection of poetry that would be fun. And that would bri...
