What an odd thing it is to see an entire species -- billions of people -- playing with, listening to meaningless tonal patterns, occupied and preoccupied for much of their time by what they call 'music.' (-- The Overlords, from Arthur C. Clarke's Chi...
Seamlessly?” Stella’s laugh escaped her mouth and it was bitter and hard. “That may be an appropriate statement, because in order to look seamless, you must need to have an entire world of shit going on under the surface. I don’t see this sea...
The physical universe was a language with a perfectly ambiguous grammar. Every physical event was an utterance that could be parsed in two entirely different ways, one casual and the other teleological, both valid, neither one disqualifiable no matte...
Two decades of virtually uninterrupted fighting had made even the most dignified structures appear drunken, wounded, or lost. The entire city seemed to affirm the notion that warfare is a disease.
Phineas created an atmosphere in which I continued now to live, a way of sizing up the world with erratic and entirely personal reservations, letting its rocklike facts sift through and be accepted only a little at a time, only as much as he could as...
The author chuckles at the resistance to using a prepared, written liturgy in prayer. He compares it to being unwilling to dress in any clothing we did not make ourselves, or being unwilling to drive a car we did not construct entirely by ourselves.
Religion has the capacity to silence critical thinking and create blindness in entire groups of people. It can infect the minds of followers so completely as to allow the most egregious sexual acts against children and others to go unchallenged for c...
All of us are on a spiritual journey and we all have a spirituality, an ultimate commitment and practices that express and nurture that commitment. Spirituality is not like frosting on a cake, an additional and optional layer, but is more like the ba...
Oooh, dinner and a show! How come you never take us to dinner and a show?" He smiled at Roxy. "I would spend the entire evening fending off the hordes of your admirers." She fanned herself and grinned back at him. "You gotta love all that suave debon...
He was one of that class of men who, apart from a scientific career in which they may well have proved brilliantly successful, have acquired an entirely different kind of culture, literary or artistic, for which their professional specialisation has ...
I've decided that it's possible to love someone for entirely selfless reasons, for all of their flaws and weaknesses, and still not succeed in having them love you back. It's sad, perhaps, but not tragic, unless you dwell forever in the pursuit of th...
Sometimes it feels as if God set you on Earth with a bottle full of nasty-tasting pills called and these instructions: Swallow one at a time. When entire prescription is finished, you may return home.
Jill had three basic statements about life, 1. It is your life, usually with some added social commentary. 2. What you want and what you get are usually two entirely different things. 3. No one ever said that life was fair.
As Harvard University psychologist Daniel Gilbert argues, 'You can't adapt to commuting, because it's entirely unpredictable. Driving in traffic is a different kind of hell every day.'
Let truth be told - women do as a rule live through such humiliations, and regain their spirits, and again look about them with an interested eye. While there's life there's hope is a connviction not so entirely unknown to the "betrayed" as some amia...
If you're alive, kick into drive. Chase whimsies. See if you can turn dreams into a way to make a living, if not an entire way of life.
The mystery of human destiny is that we are fated, but that we have the freedom to fulfill or not fulfill our fate: realization of our fated destiny depends on us. While inhuman beings like the cockroach realize the entire cycle without going astray ...
When you open to your heart, your entire world changes--it opens up around you. You see yourself as part of a friendly universe, one that is full of possibility, one that is generating and regenerating a positive energy.
I have been used to consider poetry as "the food of love" said Darcy. "Of a fine, stout, healthy love it may. Everything nourishes what is strong already. But if it be only a slight, thin sort of inclination, I am convinced that one good sonnet will ...
Can you tell me what happened?" Her lips thinned as she shook her head. "'Tis not a happy tale." "You have me reading a book about a girl who tries to kill an entire town. Anything else at this point would be a pick me up.
You’re right. The fact that the entire party of fifty guests caught you and Jill Moench kissing in the closet was a complete misunderstanding." Theo snorted, turning to Penny, "His girlfriend certainly got a surprise at her party. And it wasn’t t...
