What is the meaning of it, Watson? said Holmes solemnly as he laid down the paper. "What object is served by this circle of misery and violence and fear? It must tend to some end, or else our universe is ruled by chance, which is unthinkable. But wha...
Don't ever let them tell you that you're too stupid to do something. I'm not saying it's going to be easy for you, the way it was for you mom. Maybe you're going to have to work for it a little harder than other people, which I know isn't fair. But t...
Living on through loss seems by contrast as bad or worse; it means experiencing environmental deterioration, steady decline in human well-being, and increasing constraint on future human action consciously and slowly while realizing that they are lik...
Orion brightened. "I have an idea." "Yes?" said Foaly, daring to hope that a spark of Artemis remained. "Why don't we look for some magic stones that can grant wishes? Or, if that doesn't work, you could search my naked body for some mysterious birth...
What do you mean, 'playing really creatively'? Can you give me an example?" "Hmm, let's see ... you send the music deep enough into your heart so that it makes your body undergo a kind of a physical shift, and simultaneously the listener's body also ...
What I mean to say is probably something like this: any single human being, no matter what kind of person he or she may be, is all caught up in the tentacles of this animal like a giant octopus, and is getting sucked into the darkness. You can put an...
I can sleep anywhere. Planes. Trains. Sofa. Lawn chairs. Call it the upside to my life as an army brat. Never having a home means, I guess, that everywhere is your home. There is absolutely no place I'm anxious to return to. But this is different. I'...
Creation is thus God's presence in creatures. The Greek Orthodox theologian Philip Sherrard has written that "Creation is nothing less than the manifestation of God's hidden Being." This means that we and all other creatures live by a sanctity that i...
My wish simply is to live my life as fully as I can. In both our work and our leisure, I think, we should be so employed. And in our time this means that we must save ourselves from the products that we are asked to buy in order, ultimately, to repla...
This singularity of meaning--I was my face, I was ugliness--though sometimes unbearable, also offered a possible point of escape. It became the launching pad from which to lift off, the one immediately recognizable place to point to when asked what w...
It was frankly sort of confusing, the way everyone stared at our bodies exactly as they tried to erase the ideas of our bodies from our minds. We were supposed to get over ourselves but no one was supposed to get over us. The female body was our wors...
The shape does not change. There was a human being who was born, lived, and then, by some means or another, died. There. you may fill in the details from your own experience. As unoriginal as any other tale, as unique as any other life. Lives are lik...
Well," she said, "how can I be sure there aren't invisible people in the world? Scientists didn't believe in the mountain gorilla for hundreds of years. And now look. So if scientists can be wrong, then all of us can be wrong. I mean, what if all tho...
Ialways think it's funny when Indians celebrate Thanksgiving. I mean, sure, the Indians and Pilgrims were best friends during the first Thanksgiving, but a few years later, the Pilgrims were shooting Indians. So I'm never quite sure why we eat Turkey...
Alice thought to herself, 'Then there's no use in speaking.' The voices didn't join in this time, as she hadn't spoken, but to her great surprise, they all thought in chorus (I hope you understand what thinking in chorus means--for I must confess tha...
Scripture trains us to listen to and learn from stories of all kinds, inside the sacred text and outside, and to discern patterns and meanings within them. Stories of all sorts form and shape the character of those who read them. We live within the n...
People often told him how humble he was, but they did not mean real humility, it was merely that he did not flaunt his membership in the wealthy club, did not exercise the rights it brought—to be rude, to be inconsiderate, to be greeted rather than...
A novel examines not reality but existence. And existence is not what has occurred, existence is the realm of human possibilities, everything that man can become, everything he's capable of. Novelists draw up the map of existence by discovering this ...
When Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow meet, only Today gets to shake hands twice. That makes Today twice as important as the other two. But it also means that Today must be careful, because who knows whether Yesterday or Tomorrow washed their hands aft...
But to whom can one appeal when one does not even know where to find the judge? How can one ever hope to prove one's innocence when there is no means of knowing of what one has been accused? No, there's no justice for people like us in the world: all...
MY THESIS, in simplest terms, is: Let anyone do anything he pleases, so long as it is peaceful; the role of government, then, is to keep the peace...Keeping the peace means no more than prohibiting persons from unpeaceful actions...When government go...
