Let me have war, say I: it exceeds peace as far as day does night; it's spritely, waking, audible, and full of vent. Peace is a very apoplexy, lethargy; mulled, deaf, sleepy, insensible; a getter of more bastard children than war's a destroyer of men...
The near side of a galaxy is tens of thousands of light-years closer to us than the far side; thus we see the front as it was tens of thousands of years before the back. But typical events in galactic dynamics occupy tens of millions of years, so the...
If you want a man to trust you, ask him for a favor. Most people get this part wrong. They try to win people over by offering something to them, but humans instinctively recoil from those who help them. They like the people that they help far better,...
This much should be clear by now: the term 'renaissance' can only remain fruitful and demanding as long as it refers to a far-reaching idea: that it is the fate of Europeans to develop life and forms of life according to and alongside the Christian d...
That's what makes it so right. Your eyes—your soul is there, but the rest of you is still so undefined. That's the beauty of childhood. The eyes show everything you've seen so far, but the rest of you is still so open to possibility, to whatever yo...
I'd made it this far and refused to give up because all my life I had always finished the race.
Education will only take you so far. To go even further, I’d recommend getting a piggyback ride from a midget half your body weight.
In some parallel universe, there was a Gansey who could tell Blue that he found the ten inches of her bare calves far more tantalizing than the thirteen cubic feet of bare skin Orla sported. But in this universe, that was Adam’s job. He was in a te...
The purpose of God is far greater than your own personal fulfillment or your peace of mind, or even your happiness, your family, your career or even your dreams and ambitions.
No one has proved to me that my husband isn’t still alive somewhere in Southeast Asia. So, as far as I’m concerned, if even one man is alive, we own him more than this – than presuming him dead for the sake of tidying paperwork.
The church and the whorehouse arrived in the Far West simultaneously. And each would have been horrified to think it was a different facet of the same thing. But surely they were both intended to accomplish the same thing: the singing, the devotion, ...
... all this talking, this rather liquid confessing, was something I didn't think I could ever bring myself to do. It seemed foolhardy to me, like an uncooked egg deciding to to come out of its shell: there would be a risk of spreading out too far, t...
A letter is always better than a phone call. People write things in letters they would never say in person. They permit themselves to write down feelings and observations using emotional syntax far more intimate and powerful than speech will allow.
Looks to me like Felicity didn’t enjoy being mauled,” Daniel pointed out reasonably. When what he reasonably wanted to do, was shove Stuart’s head so far up his ass the next time he gargled he’d give himself a colonic. -
Thus far we have been able to protect [our children] from the deep and enduring traumas that scar the minds and selves of so many of the patients I see. How — how?—can I make it always so?
The Internet," [Judy] Singer said, "is a prosthetic device for people who can't socialize without it." For anyone challenged by language and social rules, a communication system that does not operate in real time is a godsend.
Those who believe their suffering has been valuable love more readily than those who see no meaning in their pain. Suffering does not necessarily imply love, but love implies suffering
Prior to her reading of the poem, light tears washed over him. He seemed to be leaking out moments that were, as far as he could tell, stored in physical parts of his body – in his shoulders, his back, his stomach. His body remembered things that h...
It was Mina this whole time, wasn’t it?" I give him the only thing I can: the cold, hard truth. The one that’ll rewrite every memory he has - of him and me, her and me, the two of them, all three of us: "It’ll always be Mina.
I don't even know how long she sobs. Time ceases to pass, and she cries, cries, cries. Clutches me and makes these sounds of a soul being ripped in two, the grief so long denied taking its toll. Fermented grief is far more potent.
He went through rooms he named as he discovered them, and which he hardly had time to appreciate before he'd flung open a door at the far end and plunged through. . . . and in the Library of All the Same Book he actually stopped to examine a few of t...
