True love, the good, beautiful, one-and-only kind, the kind between loving friends and family and partners who are mostly just trying hard to do their best, it manages to overlook some pieces of its story. It overlooks what he can’t give you or how...
Can you hear the dreams crackling like a campfire? Can you hear the dreams sweeping through the pine trees and tipis? Can you hear the dreams laughing in the sawdust? Can you hear the dreams shaking just a little bit as the day grows long? Can you he...
You should've thought of that before becoming a fireman." "Thought!" he said. "Was I given a choice? I was raised to think the best thing in the world to read. The best thing is television and radio and ball games and a home I can't afford and, Good ...
Ansar is an Arabic term that means helpers or supporters. They were the citizens of Medina who helped Prophet Mohammed upon His arrival to the Holy city. While 'Hussain' is a derivation of 'Hassan' that means 'GOOD' (I also owe this one to Khaled Hos...
This philistinism of interpretation is more rife in literature than in any other art. For decades now, literary critics have understood it to be their task to translate the elements of the poem or play or novel or story into something else. Sometimes...
... the Chinese have become very good at coming up with puns, alternative words, and memes. For example, they talk about the battle between the grass-mud horse and the river crab. The grass-mud horse, caonima, is the phonogram for "mother-fucker" - w...
War as a moral metaphor is limited, limiting, and dangerous. By reducing the choices of action to “a war against” whatever-it-is, you divide the world into Me or Us (good) and Them or It (bad) and reduce the ethical complexity and moral richness ...
As Hamlet said to Ophelia, ”God has given you one face, and you make yourself another." The battle between these two halves of identity...Who we are and who we prebend to be, is unwinnable. "Just as there are two sides to every story, there are two...
Bastian: I know books, I have 186 of them at home. Mr. Koreander: Ah, comic books. Bastian: No, I've read Treasure Island, The Last of the Mohicans, Wizard of Oz, Lord of the Rings, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Tarzan. Mr. Koreander: Whoa whoa whoa,...
Betty Schaefer: Oh, I'm sorry, Mr. Gillis, but I just didn't think it was any good. I found it flat and trite. Joe Gillis: Exactly what kind of material do you recommend? James Joyce? Dostoyevsky? Betty Schaefer: I just think that pictures should say...
[after Tommy told the story of how he got arrested] Andy Dufresne: Maybe it's time for you to switch careers. Tommy Williams: Huh? Andy Dufresne: What I mean is, you don't seem to be a very good thief, maybe you should try something else. Tommy Willi...
Charles Muntz: You know Carl, these people who come here, they all tell pretty good stories. [He walks to a row of human skulls on a shelf, each of which is wearing a hat of some kind] Charles Muntz: A surveyor making a map... [he knocks over the fir...
I once believed that life was a gift. I thought whatever I wanted I would someday possess. Is that greed, or only youth? Is it hope or stupidity? As far as I was concerned the future was a book I could write to suit myself, chapter after chapter of g...
None of it made any sense to her - the deceit, the betrayal, the sheer chutzpah of it. Like something from a movie. Who in real life acted this way? But then she remembered this had happened in India, and India was not real life. The most heartbreaki...
A love story can never be about full possession. The happy marriage, the requited love, the desire that never dims--these are lucky eventualites but they aren't love stories. Love stories depend on disappointment, on unequal births and feuding famili...
I'm also old... and my own gift for writing fantasy grows out of very literal-minded, pragmatic soil: the things I do when I'm not telling stories have always been pretty three-dimensional. I used to say that the only strong attraction reality ever h...
Firelight will not let you read fine stories but it's warm and you won't see the dust on the floor.
If you are good life is good.
Be good. See good. Choose good. It's a no-brainer.
Being a writer is a good, good thing.
The predictable thing about 'The Good Wife' is how unpredictable 'The Good Wife' is.
