[first lines] Private Detective Visser: [narrating] The world is full o' complainers. An' the fact is, nothin' comes with a guarantee. Now I don't care if you're the pope of Rome, President of the United States or Man of the Year; somethin' can all g...
Stefan Vanderhoof: [discussing the calendar] We're not gonna sell, just give it out to friends. Scott Donlan: I think we should try to sell it. Stefan Vanderhoof: Really? Scott Donlan: Yeah. Stefan Vanderhoof: Well, if we could give the money to Shih...
Economics ought to be a magpie discipline, taking in philosophy, history and politics. But heterodox approaches have long since been banished from most faculties, claims Tony Lawson. In the 1970s, when he started teaching at Cambridge, the economics ...
One of the best stories of the early Christian desert hermits goes like this: ‘Abbe Lot came to Abbe Joseph and said: Father, according as I am able, I keep my little rule, and my little fast, prayer, meditation and contemplative silence; and accor...
Few societies have come to grips with the new demography. We cling to the notion of retirement at sixty-five - a reasonable notion when those over sixty-five were a tiny percentage of the population but increasingly untenable as they approach 20 perc...
With me, travelling is frankly a vice. The temptation to indulge in it is one which I find almost as hard to resist as the temptation to read promiscuously, omnivorously and without purpose. From time to time, it is true, I make a desperate resolutio...
I think it's better to be comfortable in your skin than to be miserable being who you are. Sure, the meth is horrible. It ruins people from the inside out. It's a waiting game --- it's not a matter of if it destroys you, but rather a matter of when i...
A lot of excellent illustrators are working at the moment--especially in fantasy and children's books. It is exciting also to see graphic artists such as Dave McKean, in his film Mirrormask, moving between different media. I also greatly admire the m...
A distant love that waits to be together, is by far the most difficult relationship. It's like lighting a candle, and adoring the long flame and robust glow. Until time sets in like wax, overflowing deeper and deeper into the wick, leaving a sparse f...
Maybe life isn't for everyone, Sometimes you do things to start anew life. But the new paths will always bring you back to the old ones or just show a glimpse of it so that you again go through those thousand memories. and no matter how much you try ...
We sow the seed. We watch the plant grow. We take care of it. And when it become a tree, we kill it to make our furniture. And still the plant doesn’t know we exists or why we killed it because it doesn’t have senses like us to feel, see and hear...
If I found a job, a project, an idea or a person I wanted-I'd have to depend on the whole world. Everything has strings leading to everything else. We're all so tied together. We're all in a net, the net is waiting and it's precious to you. Do you kn...
Faith is a state of openness or trust. To have faith is like when you trust yourself to the water. You don’t grab hold of the water when you swim, because if you do you will become stiff and tight in the water, and sink. You have to relax, and the ...
We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infintesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no pre...
I don't want to be around people who accept me as is, in my unrefined state of becoming. I consistently want people around me who push and encourage me to be my ultimate best, who bring out the inner diamonds. I want to be around those intellectual g...
The brain, he writes, is like Kublai Khan, the great Mongol emperor of the thirteenth century. It sits enthroned in its skull, "encased in darkness and silence," at a lofty remove from brute reality. Messengers stream in from every corner of the sens...
On Slavery: The saddest slap in the face is we have NO monument, no real statues or memorials, no special day of Atonement or Remembrance (NOT ONE), no thanks for 400+ years of free labor, forced servitude across the Trans-Atlantic, ass beatings, buy...
I turn sentences around. That’s my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and I turn it around again. Then I have lunch. Then I come back in and write another sentence. Then I have tea and turn the new sentence around...
Marriage I think For women Is the best of opiates. It kills the thoughts That think about the thoughts, It is the best of opiates. So said Maria. But too long in solitude she'd dwelt, And too long her thoughts had felt Their strength. So when the man...
Justin wandered over to the big fir between the coach house and his studio, and began freeing the new growth from their rust colored casings. “Why do you do that?” I walked around kitten’s nose, and came up behind him. “So they have a few mor...
I write a lot of songs about love and I think that’s because to me love seems like this huge complicated thing. But it seems like every once in a while, two people get it figured out, two people get it right. And so I think the rest of us, we walk ...
