Look. (Grown-ups skip this paragraph) I'm not about to tell you this book has a tragic ending. I already said in the very first line how it was my favorite in all the world. But there's a lot of bad stuff coming.
There are three people in your life: your great love, the one you want to have children with, and the one whom you can spend the rest of your life with. If you find that last one first, you have it made.
Programmed by quanta, physics gave rise first to chemistry and then to life; programmed by mutations and recombination, life gave rise to Shakespeare; programmed by experience and imagination, Shakespeare gave rise to Hamlet.
When we meet God in the gospel, we first encounter him as a stranger, come to rescue us from a danger we did not even realize we were in.
If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. There's no use being a damn fool about it. - W.C. Fields
To me this is the first principle of life, the foundational principle, and a lesson you can't learn at the foot of any wise man: Get up! The art of living is simply getting up after you've been knocked down.
Security comes first from inside of you. Then, if you are very lucky, you will be in a position to find other people who also possess that same sort of security, and build some sort of family or community as a team.
Distinguish between getting lost and losing your way. The first is a shift in direction. The second is the absence of perspective. Cultivate perspective and you will be able to steer home.
I have loved humanity, I have loved it so much. For me, there are three kinds of men; he who curses life, he who blesses it and he who contemplates it. I loved the first for his wretchedness, the second for his indulgence and the third for his percep...
A friend of mine, the most innocuous dreamer who ever lived, once set a forest on fire to see, as he said, if it would catch as easily as people said. The first ten times the experiment was a failure; but on the eleventh it succeeded all too well.
Just then there came the wheezy sound of an accordion. It was an odd little tune that, had he been alive exactly one hundred and fifty years later, the scarf-wearing pirate would have recognized as the first few bars from ‘Theme to Murder, She Wrot...
When the Indians saw us whipping our children, they thought at first that we must hate our children, but then they thought, no, no one can hate his child. They decided it must be a religious rite, to make the child hate this world and long for the ne...
The spirit who inhabits her animates us all. Destroy the host, you destroy the power. The young die first; the old wither slowly; the eldest perhaps would go last. But she is the Queen of the Damned, and the Damned can't live without her.
It seems to me that my whole life I've been standing on some tower or a pillbox or a trampoline, waving the names of writers, as if we needed rescue. And the first person I had to rescue was myself.
Perhaps it is only the light. Perhaps it is the power of the realms at work through me. Or perhaps it is some combination of spirit and desire, love and hope, some alchemy that we each possess and can put to use, if first we know were to look without...
Death was an inverse Big Bang; an impossible magic trick where everything had become nothing in the very same instant, where one state had been replaced so completely by another that no evidence of the first could be detected, and where the catalyst ...
For a Christian to be a Christian, he must first be a sinner. Being a sinner is a prerequisite for being a church member. The Christian church is one of the few organizations in the world that requires a public acknowledgement of sin as a condition f...
Don't be jealous of anyone. I guarantee you, if everyone walked into a room, and dumped their problems onto the floor, when they saw what everyone else's problems were, they'd be scrambling to get their own problems back before someone else got to th...
She grinned, looking for all the world like a sticky-mouthed little girl who had just convinced her gullible mother that she really did drop the first piece of candy into the storm drain and would need another.
Teo had once claimed that human history began with a storm: the interval between lightning and thunder, between flash and rumble felt in the body's core, was primitive man's first experiences of time -- the awakening of consciousness, the birth of th...
I will be known forever as the Puppy who chased a cutpurse and caught fish garbage instead. My descendants will pretend I'm not in their bloodline. No – no one will want to make descendants with me. [from Beka Cooper's journal of her first day as a...
