Every great accomplishment has its share of struggle, adversity and pain. Great achievement can not exist without them. To achieve true success in our relationships and in our careers we need to be prepared to push through some pretty tough stuff. On...
She'd just had the best sex of her life, with an ex-boyfriend she'd spent the last decade pretending didn't exist, in his adorable half-finished, renovating-by-himself one room schoolhouse. Unsettled wouldn't even begin to describe how Laney should b...
The moment you realize that life will hurt more than your death. While existing, we're forced to become acquainted with sadness. There's no antibiotic for the ridding of distress, and no alleviation of these intervals of pain we must encounter. Behin...
There was a lot about my life that was crappy, now that I couldn't talk. But if I hadn't gotten drunk that night, if I hadn't gotten in that accident, would I have ever had this moment? Lying there in the sun, holding Sam's hand like time didn't exis...
The people come from everywhere, from five hundred miles, to find their fortunes. By fortune is an ugly, two-faced goddess. When you have lived with her handiwork for half a generation, you hardly notice anymore. You forget that this is not the way l...
It felt now as if I'd never known them and I couldn't know them again. It seemed to me that whatever had existed back in the place where I'd grown up was so far away now, impossible to retrieve.
But whatever any of them thought one thing was always certain: even though they suffered and had to struggle at times to bring meaning and even the most basic dignity into their existence and even though in their search for justice and truthfulness t...
What makes you a real girl or boy is that no one laughs at you. If you are imitation or unreal, the rules give you a right to exist provided you do what the real ones or brutes say. What makes you into me or Charles Morgan is that the rules allow all...
By spending years and years living entirely for yourself, thinking only about yourself, and having responsibility to no one but yourself, you end up inadvertently extending the introverted existence of a teenager deep into middle age.
A curiosity . . . no, a need for a different kind of communion. One with people not of the mountain, but rather the outsiders of the Ridge. She couldn’t explain the call of Angel Ridge. Women before her, like her mother, had experienced the same...
Loneliness clarifies. Here silence stands Like heat. Here leaves unnoticed thicken, Hidden weeds flower, neglected waters quicken, Luminously-peopled air ascends; And past the poppies bluish neutral distance Ends the land suddenly beyond a beach Of s...
You don’t know what it’s like to be a man over thirty who’s never had anything happen to him. You spend so many years trying to stay safe, stay alive, to avoid some unknown horror. Then you realize the horror is existence itself. The nothing-ha...
The true terror Jonah thought the true mystery of life was not that we are all going to die but that we were all born that we were all once little babies like this unknowing and slowly reeling in the world gathering it loop by loop like a ball of str...
I think it's the same with all the relationships between a man and a woman. They can survive anything so long as some kind of basic humanity exists between the two people. When all kindness has gone, when one person obviously and sincerely doesn't ca...
The coma carried me into a world where time and space seemed to vanish; it was a dreamlike existence in which people, places, and situations shifted as quickly as thoughts. I had a profound sense of being at a crossroads, a turning point, somewhere b...
Despite two millennia of Christian apologetics, the fact is that belief in a dying and rising messiah simply did not exist in Judaism. In the entirety of the Hebrew Bible there is not a single passage of scripture or prophecy about the promised messi...
No one wants to go through life alone, fighting battles single-handedly their whole life. Not even the hardiest of heroes. That’s just a miserable existence. Everyone needs someone in their corner, right?...Even if you could,” I wrinkled my brow,...
It is quite true what Philosophy says: that Life must be understood backwards. But that makes one forget the other saying: that it must be lived—forwards. The more one ponders this, the more it comes to mean that life in the temporal existence neve...
Change blows through the branches of our existence. It fortifies the roots on which we stand, infuses crimson experience with autumn hues, dismantles Winter’s brittle leaves, and ushers Spring into our fertile environments. Seeds of evolution burst...
The people who really thirst for life, who stand daily on the brink of every kind of death, who struggle desperately to distinguish some light in the seated mystery of human existence— these are the people to whom the Gospel of salvation is primari...
schools for love do not exist. everyone assumes that we will know how to love instinctively. despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, we still accept that the family is the primary school for love. those of us who do not learn how to love among...
