Show me a man or a woman alone and I'll show you a saint. Give me two and they'll fall in love. Give me three and they'll invent the charming thing we call 'society'. Give me four and they'll build a pyramid. Give me five and they'll make one an outc...
Although the art world reveres the unconventional, it is rife with conformity. Artists make work that "looks like art" and behave in ways that enhance stereotypes. Curators pander to the expectations of their peers and their museum boards. Collectors...
So now you must choose... Are you a child who has not yet become world-weary? Or are you a philosopher who will vow never to become so? To children, the world and everything in it is new, something that gives rise to astonishment. It is not like that...
Karma is simply the law of cause and effect. If you plant an apple seed, you don’t a get a mango tree. If we practice hatred or greed, it becomes our way and the world responds accordingly. If we practice awareness or loving-kindness, it becomes ou...
If you look around to find meaning in everything that happens, you will end up disappointed. Sometimes there aren’t reasons behind the terrible things that go on. I ask myself, If I knew all the answers, would it help? I lie awake and wonder why I ...
I'm still trying to decide how I feel about the fact that you knew about this before I did." "Don't be disappointed," Jack said. "The fact that I've been ridiculously proud of you for days doesn't change how excited you should be about this. Besides,...
Inspiration can be a wonderful thing, but it can also be quite fickle ... If you want to be able to call on inspiration reliably then you need to work on it with regularity. Someone once said that if you only go out with a bucket to collect water whe...
Sir," said the guard from behind me. "I'd appreciate it if you left your club here." I paused and looked over my shoulder, He had a gun. His hand wasn't exactly resting on it, but he'd tucked his thumb into his belt about half an inch away. "It isn't...
In any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way. The angles of vision are skewed. When a booby trap explodes,...
...I've learned that doing what you think is right doesn't always make you feel good. For another, I've learned that sometimes you just have to keep on going when you want to do nothing but drop. And that just doing the everyday things, like keeping ...
Everyday, you get home from the shops with a bag of cat food and bin-liners and realise that, yet again, you failed to have cosmetic surgery, book a cheap weekend in Paris, change your name to something more glamorous, but the fifth series of The Sop...
You're doubtless well aware that most of the great hypnotic patients wind up referring to themselves in the third person, like little children. They see themselves from outside their own organisms, outside their own sensory systems. In order to get f...
The silver car had been closing in, but just then, it took a sharp turn to the left. Where are they going? Leor wondered. But he decided to keep it to himself. The cabby nodded and ran a hand through his hair. “Alright. Well, we’re here anyways.�...
My dear Reaper," Vlad said, still laughing. 'Did you just check out our-' 'No!' I interrupted at once, almost lunging toward the staircase. 'I'm tired and still dazed from the Remanats and ... fuck it, I'm taking a shower. I mean, not a cold shower, ...
The public are a lot of jackasses. If you yell and scream and throw yourself about you'll always get a lot of damned fools to shout themselves silly. Just barnstorming, that's what you've been doing the last four nights. It was false from beginning t...
I think in the end, you would have stayed with me, out of obligation...or maybe comfort. Maybe I was safe to you, and you needed to feel that. I know how scared you get of the unknown. To you...I must be kind of a security blanket. Do you see now, ho...
I loved him. I couldn't pinpoint what made me so certain, but I knew it then, as surely as I knew my name or the color of the sky or any fact written in a book. Could he feel it, too? Maxon broke the kiss and looked at me. "You're so pretty when you ...
Maybe that's what growing up means, in the end - you go far enough in the direction of - somewhere - and you realise that you've neutered the capacity of the term home to mean anything. [...] We don't get an endless number of orbits away from the pla...
Snap out it' is abusive. It kicks people when they are down. It makes people in pain feel more hopeless, more powerless, more frustrated, more estranged from humanity. It says, 'I don't want to be bothered with your pain any longer.' For people not i...
It’s important to realize that on the journey to achieving big, you get bigger. Big requires growth, and by the time you arrive, you’re big too! What seemed an insurmountable mountain from a distance is just a small hill when you arrive—at leas...
Fear sucks. Because you never know when it will attack. Sometimes it sneaks up behind you, giggling like your best girlfriend from seventh grade. Then it whacks you on the back of the head, takes you straight to your knees before you realize what hit...
