And yet, winning is like a welcome drink going down your throat, like a beautiful embrace. It is brilliant while it lasts but it isn't forever. The high eventually melts away and the journey of life begins afresh. The truly remarkable among us visit ...
Creative work bridges time because the energy of art is not time-bound. If it were we should have no interest in the art of the past, except as history or documentary. But our interest in art is our interest in ourselves both now and always. Here and...
Love is like a wind stirring the grass beneath trees on a black night,' he had said. 'You must not try to make love definite. It is the divine accident of life. If you try to be definite and sure about it and to live beneath the trees, where soft nig...
He’d only ever seen a gun once, a smaller one on the hip of that old deputy, a gun he’d always figured was more for show. He stuffed a fistful of deadly rounds in his pocket, thinking how each one could end an individual life, and understanding w...
There are a lot of times the heart burrows deeper, goes tunnelling into itself for reasons only the heart itself seems to know.They are times of isolation, of hibernation, sometimes of desolation. There is a bareness that spreads out over the interio...
A traveller moves among real people in their own milieu and learns from them, soaking up their wisdom and philosophy, their way of being in the world. A tourist simply hops from one tourist highpoint to another, skimming across the surface, cramming ...
When a man sees a dying animal, horror comes over him: that which he himself is, his essence, is obviously being annihilated before his eyes--is ceasing to be. But when the dying one is a person, and a beloved person, then, besides a sense of horror ...
If we internalize every disappointing setback with contempt and self-loathing, a life of solitary confinement and discontentment awaits us. It’s a verdict indicted by a prosecution, deliberated by a jury and condemned by a judge…all three being y...
There weren't any promises of a future life together, either, but he didn't need to live like a monk anymore. Two years was more than enough time for soul-searching and penance. As long as Laney was close enough to touch, to breath in, to taste like ...
The Self says ‘I AM’–as in the very grand sayings of Christ, especially in the Gospel of John, in which he says in the state of onenenss with Yahweh (which in Hebrew means ‘I AM’), I AM is the way and the truth and the life–but the ego sa...
If man is not made in the image of God, nothing then stands in the way of inhumanity. There is no good reason why mankind should be perceived as special. Human life is cheapened. We can see this in many of the major issues being debated in our societ...
This is a lot more satisfying," he said, "when I have intelligent life whom I can render awed, rapt with attention for my clever verbosity." The ugly lizard-crab-thing on the next rock over clicked its claw, an almost hesitant sound. "Your right, of ...
Since we must and do write each our own way, we may during actual writing get more lasting instruction not from another's work, whatever its blessings, however better it is than ours, but from our own poor scratched-over pages. For these we can hold ...
You always fed strays and bent down to talk to the dogs you met on the street, looking straight into their eyes as if they were old friends. (Maybe they are, you said. From another life.) You liked to go to the pound and look at them. You tried to se...
The war had been a daily thought, a continual consciousness in her life for two years, but never a real presence. Battles were things that were fought somewhere else, won somehow, by someone, and lost by someone else. Now as she stood by her own door...
I was on a walking tour of Oxford colleges once with a group of bored and unimpressable tourists. They yawned at Balliol's quad, T.E. Lawrence's and Churchill's portraits, and the blackboard Einstein wrote his E=mc2 on. Then the tour guide said, 'And...
Buddha is someone with a very advanced self-concept. His self-esteem is perfect; he has gone beyond doubt; he knows, and he is confident of his knowledge; he expresses himself with conviction. When the Buddha talks of himself in the first person he d...
Although I knew enough Freud to believe that the sex urge was an important mainspring of life, it still seemed to me that any conscious manifestation of sex was necessarily ludicrous. Defecation and copulation were two activities which made a human b...
Letting there be room for not knowing is the most important thing of all. When there's a big disappointment, we don't know if that's the end of the story. It may just be the beginning of a great adventure. Life is like that. We don't know anything. W...
Wildflowers burst from the ground in vivid blues and whites and violets, creating a picture more pleasing than anything her hands could design. She didn't understand how it was possible, but Evan had been right. The abundance of snow had produced an ...
A Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville, came to America more than a century ago and made some astute observations about the American way. He said that we have a misleading idea at the very head of our Constitution: the pursuit of happiness. One can not p...
