My chest tightens to the point I fear my heart will suffocate from the pressure of it. Society's standards are the total opposite from how I was raised. The boy who I thought to be so strikingly handsome has less than a year of his life to live, my n...
In fact we do not try to picture the afterlife, nor is it our selves in our nervous tics and optical flecks that we wish to perpetuate; it is the self as the window on the world that we can't bear to thinkof shutting. My mind when I was a boy of ten ...
I am quite likely to re-act to the opposite extreme - to feel rapturously that the world is beautiful and mere existence something to thank God for. I suppose our 'blues' are the price we have to pay for our temperament. 'The gods don't allow us to b...
Soft sun shone down on a misty cathedral at the opposite end of a football-field length courtyard. The cathedral had a long pointed tower with beautiful rose and ivory stained glass windows. Pink-petal flowers and deep green ivy climbed the stones fr...
But greater than all these delights would be the possession of this wondrous library for my own use and pleasure. What more could my bibliophile's soul ask for? Here were marvels without end, treasures beyond knowing. You have seen the worst of me in...
There is no social stigma attached to the frenzy, no peer motivation to slow us down. Rather it is the opposite; busy is popular currency, traded among members of modern society like a precious commodity. Busy is the silkiest cloth at the emporium, t...
But how can we venture to reprove or praise the universe! Let us beware of attributing to it heartlessness and unreason or their opposites: it is neither perfect nor beautiful nor noble, and has no desire to become any of these; it is by no means str...
This assumption of the intrinsically repressive nature of collective experience and redemptive power of individuation is a staple of contemporary art theory and criticism. I would argue that a closer analysis of collaborative and collective art pract...
Sometimes we make being happy so difficult.And being thankful such a chore. Starting the day like a job we hate. Beginning it like swallowing ten tablespoons of devil made cough syrup. Because, somehow, along the way, we forget that being alive and h...
...legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or ...
People sometimes imagine that without desire there would be no enjoyment. The opposite is true. When you're caught up in craving, you never really enjoy anything very much because your mind is always pulling you on to the next desire and the next aft...
The way I pictured it, all this grief would be like a winter night when you're standing outside. You'll warm up once you get used to the cold. Except after you've been out there for awhile, you feel the warmth draining out of you and you realize the ...
The girl's life had been squandered in the streets, and among the most noisome of the stews and dens of London, but there was something of the woman's original nature left in her still; and when she heard a light step approaching the door opposite to...
To be cynical is to be distant. While offering a false intimacy of being "in the know," cynicism actually destroys intimacy. It leads to a creeping bitterness that can deaden and even destroy the spirit... A praying life is just the opposite. It enga...
The harder you slam a ball into the ground, the higher it bounces back up... A divorce, a breakup, losing a job, or just feeling seriously down can ground you, rough you up a bit, leave calluses on your feet and grit under your finger nails. But more...
There we were - demented children mincing about in clothes that no one ever wore, speaking as no man ever spoke, swearing love in wigs and rhymed couplets, killing each other with wooden swords, hollow protestations of faith hurled after empty promis...
They always believe that 'things are in a bad way now,' but they 'haven't any faith in these idealists.' One minute they call Wilson 'just a dreamer, not practical'- a year later they rail at him for making his dreams realities. They haven't clear lo...
I’m so sorry,” he said, because after Pamela died, he promised himself that if anyone told him the smallest, saddest story, he would answer, I’m so sorry. Meaning, Yes, that happened. You couldn't believe the people who believed that not mentio...
This self now as I leant over the gate looking down over fields rolling in waves of colour beneath me made no answer. He threw up no opposition. He attempted no phrase. His fist did not form. I waited. I listened. Nothing came, nothing. I cried then ...
If diversity is a source of wonder, its opposite - the ubiquitous condensation to some blandly amorphous and singulary generic modern culture that takes for granted an impoverished environment - is a source of dismay. There is, indeed, a fire burning...
[T]hat state, love, is so utterly alien to that other idea without which we cannot live as human beings --- the idea of justice. It is only because love is so profoundly the enemy of justice that our minds, shrinking in horor from its true nature, tr...
