We are split people. For myself, half of me wishes to sit quietly with legs crossed, letting the things that are beyond my control wash over me. But the other half wants to fight a holy war. Jihad! And certainly we could argue this out in the street,...
She has no head for politics, craves good jewelry, trusts too readily, marries too early. Then one by one she sends away her friends and stands apart, smug sapphire, her answer to everything a slender zero, a silent shrug--and every day still hears m...
If God created our will, then he's responsible for every choice we make... So-- as I recall, the official philosophical answer is that free will doesn't exist. Only the illusion of free will, because the causes of hour behavior are so complex that we...
I hate you for all the years I 'll have to live without you. How can a heart hurt this much and still go on beating? How can I feel this bad without dying from it? I 've bruised my knees with praying to have you back. None of my prayers have been ans...
In the book of Job, the Lord demands, “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?” “I was there!”-surely that is the answer to God’s question. For no matter how the universe came into being, most of the atoms in these fleetin...
Writing is difficult. You do it all alone without encouragement and without any certainty that you'll ever be published or paid or even that you'll be able to finish the particular work you've begun. It isn't easy to persist amid all that. [...] Some...
It pained her that a few hundred words in an also-ran newspaper could get her kicked out. That damned article. And Rook. Her sharpest agony. She had invested in this guy. Waited for this guy. Felt something for this guy that went beyond the bedroom ....
One hundred twenty-nine women with previously documented histories of sexual victimization in childhood were interviewed and asked detailed questions about their abuse histories to answer the question "Do people actually forget traumatic events such ...
I should have written you a letter, it was too late to make the deaths of my brothers an excuse. Since they died, I wrote a book; why not a letter? A mysterious but truthful answer is that while I can gear myself up to do a novel, letters, real-life ...
How come he cannot recognize his own cruelty now turned against him? How come he can't see his own savagery as a colonist in the savagery of these oppressed peasants who have absorbed it through every pore and for which they can find no cure? The ans...
He was surprised at the way she answered. She had taken a long time to say that. She had nodded her head in a deep way too. Had she wished to affect him with some sort of premonition? He wondered unhappily. Or was it only that she would not help him,...
I am sure that I am in possession of a soul that is at the very least, a thousand years old. And I say this not on a whim; I say this as someone who is sure of something, who is not thinking fancifully but who is thinking solidly and fully. So why is...
I think the strangest thing that exists, is how there are seven billion people on the planet and yet, so many people can spend their whole lives looking for somebody to love and never, ever find that. There are so many things that we can find in othe...
Christians often ask why God does not speak to them, as he is believed to have done in former days. When I hear such questions, it always makes me think of the rabbi who asked how it could be that God often showed himself to people in the olden days ...
The Great Ones, the sages of every age, tell me what to look for. They say that the answer lies not elsewhere but right where I am, here where I am both the center and the source of the universe. They say that, contrary to what I may think I am, what...
Beyond egoistic interests there is no goodness. If one decides to do some good thing, of course according to his ideal of goodness, it must be connected to his Ego consciously or unconsciously. One of noble motives that triggers to do goodness is emp...
Faith is a light. You could be experiencing one of the darkest nights of the soul, lost, confused with no answers, no guidance. Those are all dark thoughts that we have had when we felt the most alone. But we escaped because we believed. That's the p...
The great cause of the new Republican intake is the reduction of the deficit but to anyone seeking evidence of sincere attempts at deficit-reduction the evidence is baffling. The Republicans showed before Christmas that they would seek to reduce the ...
[Bela Lugosi answers the door on Halloween night wearing his Dracula costume] Children: Trick or treat! [At the sight of Dracula, all but one little boy scream and run away] Bela Lugosi: Aren't you scared, little boy? I'm going to drink your blood! T...
Harry Potter: Dumbledore trusted me to see this through. Aberforth Dumbledore: What makes you think you can trust him? What makes you think you can believe anything my brother told you? In all the time you knew him, did he ever mention my name? Did h...
Lucius Malfoy: [walking with Bellatrix slowly up to Harry] Haven't you always wondered what was the reason for the connection between you and the Dark Lord. Why he was unable to kill you when you were just an infant. Don't you want to know the secret...