All this, sadly enough, is truer of the more educated, higher-income, professional families. It is here that the competition is the greatest, the expectations most elevated. If the boy would be happier as a telephone linesman or a forest ranger, he i...
What we do see depends mainly on what we look for. ... In the same field the farmer will notice the crop, the geologists the fossils, botanists the flowers, artists the colouring, sportmen the cover for the game. Though we may all look at the same th...
Between the inner and outer beaches, a strand of woods thrived: palms, palmettos, mahogany, figs, and calabash. Coconut palms and fig trees dropped enough fruit to feed the wildlife that swooped by in droves. It was so easy to catch a fish with your ...
Leo resisted the urge to throw a grenade in Frank's face. "I suppose I should know who Pelops was?" "He was a prince, won his wife in a chariot race. Supposedly he started the Olympic games in honor of that." Hazel sniffed. "How romantic. 'Nice wife ...
It's a great lesson about not being too precious about your writing. You have to try your hardest to be at the top of your game and improve every joke you can until the last possible second, and then you have to let it go. You can't be that kid stand...
The closer we get—the more I let you in…the more dangerous this gets. We’re just pawns in this game, and I wasn’t playing before. I was just a piece to move about the board, but I am playing now. Don’t you get it? You’re what everyone wan...
(Rude Scrabble) You played this game with your parents?" he asked skeptically. Yep. And Mom always won, the dirty bitch. I guess being older she'd been around more than me and Carrie," Sophie said, extracting replacement tiles from the box. "Although...
Henry turned as if to dart out of the room, then swung around and stared at them, a look of confusion passing over his freckled face, as if he had only now had cause to wonder why Will, Tessa, and Jem might be crouching together in a mostly disused s...
It's funny how much of childhood is about proximity. Like who your best friend is is directly correlated to how close your houses are; who you sit next to in music is all about how close your names are in the alphabet. Such a game of chance.
Under opacity and in the newfound complexity of the world, people can hide risks and hurt others, with the law incapable of catching them. Iatrogenics has both delayed and invisible consequences. It is hard to see causal links, to fully understand wh...
They teach us that human beings learn and absorb ideas and concepts through narrative, through stories, not through lessons or theoretical speeches. This is what any religious texts teach us. They’re all tales about characters who must confront lif...
A young man is the perfect soldier. He has great potential for aggression and a limited critical capacity—or none at all—with which to analyze it and judge how to channel it. Throughout history societies have found ways of using this store of agg...
Do you know what religion is, Martin, my friend? -I can barely remember Lord's Prayer. -A beautiful and well-crafted prayer. Poetry aside, a religion is really a moral code that is expressed through legends,myths, or any type of literary device in or...
The two studied one another for what seemed hours, neither saying a word. Jaden’s first inclination was to yell and demand his freedom, but something held him back. Here was a new man, and a new set of mind games. He waited for the old man to speak...
One of the tragedies of current Christianity in America is that we have so few compelling illustrations of this life that Jesus lived and the type of radical community he came to create. Leading pastors and preachers are little more than family-frien...
When you forget what you ultimately stand for, you rejoice in blinding ignorance. Missing the bigger picture for the near pleasure is what humans and all living beings stand for. I guess there is no alternate way either. Because it is after all a gam...
You’re going to work in this life, and you’re going to play. And when the last days come, you’ll look back and find that that’s all there was, an endless stream of days going back to today. But if you can find the thing you should be doing, t...
Although science is not easy in complex human systems, we cannot afford to throw our hands in the air and give up. It may take decades, but it is a game worth playing and winning.
This was a new recognition that perfection is admirable but a trifle inhuman, and that a stumbling kind of semi-success can be much more warming. Most of all, perhaps, these exultant yells for the Mets were also yells for ourselves, and came from a w...
Once you take to the habit of deception, every new lie comes that much easier. Though to me it wasn't so much lies as a matter of judicious editing. We all inevitable present a version of ourselves that is a collection of half-truths and exclusions. ...
One sticking point was that Jobs wanted his payout to be in cash. Amelio insisted that he needed to "have skin in the game" and take the payout in stock that he would agree to hold for at least a year.” Jobs resisted. Finally, they compromised: Job...