If music serves to convey feelings through the interaction of physical gestures and sound, the musician needs his brain state to match the emotional state he is trying to express. Although the studies haven't been performed yet, I'm willing to bet th...
"Santa Claus represents God on assistance," said Clyde. "Santa Claus is a negative-idealed god, the pagan god of material worship," Leon stated. "Christmas means the rebirth, regeneration. Some people have Christmas every day. The Christmas tree stan...
Aurora sagged. "Why is it," she asked, "that every time I'm with you two we end up stealing something big?" "We always return it," Donegan said, a little defensively. "Maybe not always in one piece or necessarily to the right person but return it we ...
If writers write not just with paper and ink or a word processor but with their own life's blood, then I think something like this is perhaps always the case. A book you write out of the depths of who you are, like a dream you dream out of those same...
Suicide. It's something I've been thinking about. Not too seriously, but I have been thinking about it.” That's the note. Word for word. And I know it's word for word because I wrote it dozens of times before delivering it. I'd write it, throw it a...
At any given point you can release your greatest self. Don’t let anyone hold you back. Don’t let anyone dilute you. Don’t be peer pressured into being less than you are. People willing to dilute themselves for the sake of others is one of the g...
When you lose a friend [in battle] you have an overpowering desire to go back home and yell in everybody's ear, "This guy was killed fighting for you. Don't forget him--ever. Keep him in your mind when you wake up in the morning and when you go to be...
It seems like every day you have to deal with problems, interpersonal problems, survival, and so on and so forth. But you only have one problem and there is one solution to that problem. Isn’t that nice to think it is so simple? If there is such a ...
I loved the fact there was a God who had made me, who had created everything around me. Jesus made sense to me. He’s real. He’s personal.” “He likes you,” Bishop remarked gently. “Exactly…I wasn’t smarted than He was. I adored Jesus f...
Louie found the raft offered an unlikely intellectual refuge. He had never recognized how noisy the civilized world was. Here, drifting in almost total silence, with no scents other than the singed odor of the raft, no flavors on his tongue, nothing ...
ALL HE COULD SEE, IN EVERY DIRECTION, WAS WATER. It was June 23, 1943. Somewhere on the endless expanse of the Pacific Ocean, Army Air Forces bombardier and Olympic runner Louie Zamperini lay across a small raft, drifting westward. Slumped alongside ...
I was living and dying in all the fibers of what is chewed and digested and in all the fibers that absorb the sun, consuming and digesting. Under the thatched arbor of a restaurant on a river-bank, where Olivia had waited for me, our teeth began to m...
I don't even like the word ‘indoors’. It doesn’t make sense. According to you right now, by stepping through the doorway I’d be indoors. Yet I wouldn’t actually be standing in the doorway. If it’s supposed to refer to being inside a build...
The coast is an edgy place. Living on the coast presents certain stark realities and a wild, rare beauty. Continent confronts ocean. Weather intensifies. It's a place of tide and tantrum; of flirtations among fresh- and saltwaters, forests and shores...
Let us be dissatisfied until America will no longer have high blood pressure of creeds and an anemia of deeds. Let us be dissatisfied until the tragic walls that separate the outer city of wealth and comfort from the inner city of poverty and despair...
Well, sometimes love seems easy. Like ... it's easy to love rain ... and hawks. And it's easy to love wild plums ... and the moon. But with people, seems like love's a hard thing to know. It gets all mixed up. I mean, you can love one person in one w...
One of the things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to s...
The librarian was explaining the benefits of the Dewey decimal system to her junior—benefits that extended to every area of life. It was orderly, like the universe. It had logic. It was dependable. Using it allowed a kind of moral uplift, as one's ...
Babies of around one year old are often active by day and wake frequently at night, for no obvious reason. Then a mother can feel desparate for sleep yet equally desparate to comfort her baby when he needs her at night. I have spoken to many mothers ...
If we want to live perfectly happy lives...we must drive out selfish character tendencies such as pride, ego, vanity, jealousy, lusts, envy and worry. When we learn to live selflessly, putting others before ourselves, committing to what is noble, rig...
You see, that's who you are, Joe. All these things. That's the person I know, and through him is the way you'll know me, because connected to all these things are , and for so many of them, I was there. And that's the thing that hurts so much... You ...
