I think maybe the classic formulation was by David Hume in "Of the First Principles of Government," where he pointed out that "Force is always on the side of the governed." Whether it's a military society, a partially free society, or what we - not h...
I’d never seen him bare-chested. For the first time, he seemed vulnerable to me. His smooth, tight skin wrapped around the long muscles he’d developed over a lifetime of hard work. He found a shallow spot and sat, settling me onto his lap, holdin...
I didn't think past the first step of anything, that was the key. I drank a Coke and didn't worry about how to recycle the can or about the acid puddling in my belly, acid so powerful it could strip clean a penny. We went to a dumb movie and I didn't...
Committing to Nick, feeling safe with Nick, being happy with Nick, made me realize that there was a Real Amy in there, and she was so much better, more interesting and complicated and challenging, than Cool Amy. Nick wanted Cool Amy anyway. Can you i...
Charlie slowly crumpled to the floor, Allison soon joining him. “Dinner is served!” Stanley trumpeted, as he reached into the steaming mass of offal and fished around for the teens’ livers. “Aha!” he crowed, as he lifted one liver in each h...
I’ve stripped my life down,” he told me. “I don’t need much. I have all the company I want to keep right in here.” He shot himself in the head with his fingers. “People don’t understand about the need to live simply. They make appointme...
Paradoxically .. the very feminist movement that gave women more options also helped create pressure on many of us to be strong, successful, and independent—the kind of women who would theoretically be immune to any form of abuse from men. As a res...
Okay, on my first night, he tried to chat me up. You know how the story goes. ‘You have the most beautiful eyes, I’m very rich, want to see my bedroom?’ Blah, blah, blah.” “And because you turned him down, he’s more determined than ever,�...
And there’s no synthetic owners manual?” His lips twitched, smile threatening to break into a grin. A joke. He wasn’t funny. “Do you come with an owners’ manual, Captain? Because I’d like to study your troubleshooting section.” “Would...
On accepting adversity in our lives: Always it is initiated by an act of will on our part; we set ourselves to believe in the overruling goodness, providence, and sovereignty of God and refuse to turn aside no matter what may come, no matter how we m...
The second suggestion is to think as well as to read. I know people who read and read, and for all the good it does them they might just as well cut bread-and-butter. They take to reading as better men take to drink. They fly through the shires of li...
At that moment, Harry fully understood for the first time why people said Dumbledore was the only wizard Voldemort had ever feared. The look upon Dumbledore's face as he stared down at the unconscious form of Mad-Eye moody was more terrible than Harr...
Then to top it all off, you were only reacting to me because you were impaired! That's rich! You know what those drugs did to you in the first dose, before the second one made you comatose? They killed the bug up your arse!" With that, he yanked the ...
I felt like a disappointment. I believed I had let my family down. Clearly, I was a screw-up. I couldn’t do anything right. It seemed I hurt people without even trying. I didn’t know better, but obviously, that proved I was stupid. I was so blind...
Images flashed through his mind. He saw Nico and his sister on a snowy mountain cliff in Maine, Percy Jackson protecting them from the manticore. Percy's sword gleamed in the dark. He'd been the first demigod Nico had ever seen in action. Later at Ca...
A shade of sorrow passed over Taliesin's face. 'There are those,' he said gently, 'who must first learn loss, despair, and grief. Of all paths to wisdom, this is the cruelest and longest. Are you one who must follow such a way? This even I cannot kno...
David Lipsky: Why aren't you married at thirty-four? David Foster Wallace: You first. David Lipsky: Um-I think it's hard to fill that role...to cast it and to fill it when you know it's for thirty or forty years...someone who, whatever mental landsca...
Leaves that rustled, twigs that scraped and rattled. But the thin shapes weren't falling, they were scurrying head first down the tree-trunks at a speed that seemed to leave time behind. Some of them had no shape they could have lived with, and some ...
The first thing you need to know if you are a survivor is that parts of you have probably been trained to create a variety of symptoms and behaviours. Abusers actually train child parts to cut the body, to make other parts cut, to attempt suicide, to...
Now if BECOMING history is the particularity of the Son in the economy, what is the contribution of the Spirit? Well, precisely the opposite: it is to liberate the Son and the economy from the bondage of history. If the Son dies on the cross, thus su...
I see, I see! From association Messala, in boyhood, was almost a Jew; had he remained here, he might have become a proselyte, so much do we all borrow from the influences that ripen our lives; but the years in Rome have been too much for him. I do no...
