I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an emp...
Whether we realize it or not, most of us define ourselves by opposing rather than by favoring something or someone. To put it another way, it is easier to react than to act. Nothing arouses a passion for dogma more than a good antagonist. And the mor...
I want to kiss you.” Jace’s whisper pulled me from my thoughts and I glanced up to find his eyes blazing with raw need. “Just because Marc won’t touch you doesn’t mean I shouldn’t. Right? I don’t have that kind of self-control, and hone...
There is a part of me that no one ever sees. I hide behind a mask of heavy make-up and ever-changing hair and clothing. I try to reinvent myself. It doesn’t work. There are times when I am bone-crushingly sad. I just want to curl into a ball and hi...
Technical knowledge, divorced from what it is supposed to be knowledge of, yields only the illusion of understanding. It's like being able to reel off the locations in a baseball field -- first base, second base, third base, home plate, left field, r...
I can't give up on anyone either, even someone who's burned every bridge like Drake Schultz. Getting him to deal with his insecurities and whatever it is he's trying to hide. It's this never-ending cycle of self-hatred that I have to address before I...
She came downstairs like a doe stepping into a clearing on the first day of hunting season. I felt like a coward. I was lower than dirt. I had used every trick in my book to get her to come downstairs. I had manipulated her emotions, cheated and worm...
When you're bouncing around from pin to pin, it is probably very difficult to know that outside the game there's a room and outside the room there's a town and outside the town there's a country and outside the country there's a world and outside the...
DiMaggio's grace came to represent more than athletic skill in those years. To the men who wrote about the game, it was a talisman, a touchstone, a symbol of the limitless potential of the human individual. That an Italian immigrant, a fisherman's so...
After Nick rescued Kate from an attack at the football game they talk as he drives her home. "I said that because I really did see a monster." I looked at Nick as we turned a corner in the road. "You don't think I'm crazy do you?" I like that quote b...
I tell you, Professor, growing up is a full contact sport. Somewhere in our brains, foolishness and naïveté join forces with a false sense of invincibility. Together, they score own-goals against their host’s interests. All this happens while tha...
We may well discover that the business failure we avoid and the business success we strive for do not lead us to personal success at all. Most of us have inherited notions of "success" from someone else or have arrived at these notions by facing a se...
The thing I want you especially to understand is this feeling of divine revelation. I feel that this structure was "out there" all along I just couldn't see it. And now I can! This is really what keeps me in the math game-- the chance that I might gl...
Every form of strength is also a form of weakness,” he once wrote. “Pretty girls tend to become insufferable because, being pretty, their faults are too much tolerated. Possessions entrap men, and wealth paralyzes them. I learned to write because...
Whether it means prizing the value of lessons learned, building games into your creative process, or getting gifts upon certain milestones of achievement, self-derived rewards make a big difference…You cannot ignore or completely escape the deeply ...
We reviewed the ways we had to bring customers: Method A, flying aerobatics at the edge of town. Method B, the parachute jump. Then we began experimenting with Method C. There is a principle that says if you lay out a lonely solitaire game in the cen...
For several years Quinn had been having the same conversations with this man, whose name he did not know. Once, when he had been in the luncheonette, they had talked about baseball, and now, each time Quinn came in, they continued to talk about it. I...
If you can understand and believe that you have made choices that took you to a place you don't like, doesn't it make logical sense thatyou can now make choices that will take you to a place you do like?" ..."So now your game becomes one of seeking w...
Cole - I just thought of a new game. Jaz - What's that? Cole - Splat the Specter. Jaz - Rules? Cole - You can help me make them up. Right now all I know for sure is that it involves water guns filled with grape Kool-Aid and two ferrets named Biff and...
Last night I missed two free throws which would have won the game against the best team in the state. The farm town high school I play for is nicknamed the "Indians," and I'm probably the only actual Indian ever to play for a team with such a mascot....
You are interfering in my business, warlock." Magnus spat blood into his face. "You are torturing a child in my city, Shadowhunter. [...] I thought we were playing a game where we said what the other person was and what we were doing." Magnus told hi...
