As you get older, stuff starts to wear down. I can't play four basketball games a week anymore. It takes me three days to recover from one. I'm a little older, a little scrappier. So now I do yoga instead. And whatever else happens in the day, I'm se...
Cyrano: The leaves--- Roxane: What color---Perfect Venetian red! Look at them fall. Cyrano: Yes---they know how to die. A little way From the branch to the earth, a little fear Of mingling with the common dust---and yet They go down gracefully---a fa...
Once again, it seemed, I was discovering the truth of the rule, a rule I'd never explicitly formulated to myself, but whose veracity I'd quite often sensed in a vague sort of way, which was that the chances of seeing an idea through to completion are...
My mother was strong, in all the ways I was weak. She fell, she hurt, she felt. She lived. And for all the tumble of her experiences, she still had hope. Maybe this next time would do the trick. Or maybe not. But unless you stepped into the game, you...
I have prayed for years for one good humiliation a day, and then, I must watch my reaction to it. I have no other way of spotting both my denied shadow self and my idealized persona.
These programs and reading series are the fruit of an intellectually exhausted literacy industry that lost its way long ago, even as we mutely accepted its misguided agenda - to complicate reading and literacy so that we will purchase its programs an...
I'm sorry. I didn't know what else to do," I breathed, trying hard to pretend I wasn't fazed by what just happened. "You weren't listening to me." He stared at me with intensity for several seconds. "That's an interesting way to get my attention.
Witches never existed, except in people’s minds. All there was in the olden days was women and some men who believed in herbal cures and in folklore and in the wish to fly. Witches? We’re all witches in one way or another. Witches was the inventi...
I want her to leave me because I’m scared shitless that I’ll never be the man she sees when she looks at me with all that love and trust in her eyes. My biggest fear is failing her, and I can’t see any way to prevent that from happening.
The passion of Jesus is lonely only as all our deaths are lonely. He is with us in the loneliness of death, too. And so, he and we are not alone even there. The same blow that strikes him dead, strikes us all dead, and it strikes us in the same way.
The only way someone can be of help to you is in challenging your ideas. If you're ready to listen and if you're ready to be challenged, there's one thing that you can do, but no one can help you. What is this most important thing of all? It's called...
Care for your infant business or career as you would care for your infant child - with loving attention, with no expectation of any reward, being in the moment with it, accepting it as is, watching it grow, enjoying every step of the way.
[while dancing] The man who was supposed to be her new partner had taken the caller’s final instruction to extremes. From the way Adam’s mouth was locked against Kitty’s he seemed to be anticipating not a temporary split but a lengthy separatio...
He was too many things at once - a boy, a man, and everything in between - and the differing parts of himself seldom came into balance. She found him attractive in that way. Yet the perception saddened her: she herself wasn't too many things, but too...
Look at it this way: We're two people who happen to have a lot in common, a connection most people would kill for, we trust each other, and we have the kind of sex that people base pornos on. The fact that we're both men really doesn't make a differe...
Some of my relatives held on to imagined memories the way homeless people hold onto lottery tickets. Nostalgia was their crack cocaine, if you will, and my childhood was littered with the consequences of their addiction : unserviceable debts, squabbl...
You don't become a runner by winning a morning workout. The only true way is to marshal the ferocity of your ambition over the course of many day, weeks, months, and (if you could finally come to accept it) years. The Trial of Miles; Miles of Trials.
Many who read their Bibles make the great mistake of confining all their reading to certain portions of the Bible which they enjoy. In this way they get no knowledge of the Bible as a whole. They miss altogether many of the most important phases of B...
The most common mistake students of literature make is to go straight for what the poem or novel says, setting aside the way that it says it. To read like this is to set aside the ‘literariness’ of the work – the fact that it is a poem or play ...
I am a sick man - oh, not my body. It is my soul, my brain. I seem to have lost all values. I care for nothing. If you had been this way a few months ago, it would have been different. It is too late, now.
In 1938, when I had decided that the only way to see the country was in a trailer, and I built the trailer which I still have and lived in it for eighteen months, and learned America from San Diego to the Canadian border, from Miami to New Jersey, an...
