When you are able to know the right thing, you are intelligent. But when you choose that right thing to do, you are wise. This means people can get money, education, marriage, and good health and not get wisdom. Wisdom is the number one gift for a Go...
Justification has so dominated the landscape of Christian thought that adoption has been marginalized. We don't hear much about our adoption at all. We hear a lot about forgiveness, but very little about the staggering reality of our inclusion in Jes...
I felt a little guilty about jangling the poor bugger's brains with that evil fantasy. But what the hell? Anybody who wanders around the world saying, "Hell yes, I'm from Texas," deserves whatever happens to him.
I've always considered writing the most hateful kind of work. I suspect it's a bit like fucking — which is fun only for amateurs. Old whores don't do much giggling. Nothing is fun when you have to do it — over and over, again and again...
I wondered If things that might seem frightening could lose their hold over you. I wondered If we find the people we need when we need them. I wondered If we attract our future by some sort of invisible force, or If we are drawn to it by a similar fo...
Mrs. Mudkin closed her eyes. "We should pray." "I ain't praying," Crazy Cora said. Mrs. Mudkin said, "Lord, please bless---" "I ain't praying." "--this land and the people who--" "I ain't praying." "--have toiled on this earth--" "Stop that praying."...
We paint from within outward - if we force our vision on the world it calls us great painters; if we don't it ignores us; but we are the same. We don't attach any meaning to greatness or smallness. What happens to our work afterward is unimportant; w...
Design is one of the few disciplines that is a science as well as an art. Effective, meaningful design requires intellectual, rational rigor along with the ability to elicit emotions and beliefs. Thus, designers must balance both the logic and lyrici...
The moon had spread over everything a thin layer of silver - over the rank grass, over the mud, upon the wall of matted vegetation standing higher than the wall of a temple, over the great river I could see through a sombre gap glittering, glittering...
One must shed the bad taste of wanting to agree with many. "Good" is no longer good when one's neighbor mouths it. And how should there be a "common good"! The term contradicts itself: whatever can be common always has little value. In the end it mus...
What a nuisance is the friend who must have this and that, whose likes and hates are infinite, with bitter and loud voiced complaint about the whole of circumstance? How pleasant are the truly great who, wanting nothing, are content with anything. Ac...
A blanket could be used as Concealment Revealer. It both conceals and reveals, like great dialogue. Here’s some great dialogue I wrote for two characters, Mr. Brick, and Ms. Blanket: Mr. Brick: I like your dress Ms. Blanket: I’m naked, you ...
I put it to the great man [Hitchcock], the key to fictitious terror is partition or containment: so long as the Bates Motel is sealed off from our world, we want to peer in, like at a scorpion enclosure. But a film that shows the world is a Bates Mot...
His Majesty has done absolutely nothing but waste his time darling around eating sweets, contributing to the boy's adolescent chubiness, and to the sense of the country's political drift. Rather than being encouraged to govern, the Shah's courtiers p...
Between the Great Depression and the 1970s, private business was viewed with suspicion even in most capitalist economies. Businesses were, so the story goes, seen as anti-social agents whose profit-seeking needed to be restrained for other, supposedl...
The crying wailed, somewhere beneath the planks. Several sweeps of the light showed that the cellar was otherwise deserted. Though the face mouthed behind him, he ventured down. For God’s sake, get it over with; he knew he would never dare return.
He slammed the door and ran blindly down the corridor, grabbing at handles. What exactly had he seen? They had been eating with their bare hands, but somehow the only thought he could hold on to was a kind of sickened gratitude that he had been unabl...
For more than a century-and-a-half, Europeans had been killing North American Indians with firewater… Now, in the first decades of the nineteenth century, Canada’s pioneer settlers were killing themselves with their own medicine. About Canada. To...
Sometimes books feel like the only thing that keep her sane. Actually, she knows that they're the only reason she's still even vaguely okay right now. That's what she clings to: reading great books and seeing great films and, for as long as she's imm...
Bonnie and Jerry told me they never run away fro disagreements. They face each one head-on. "By holding it in, you'll begin to slowly form a negative opinion of each other," Bonnie reasoned, "which means you can't work out what the disagreement is.
I've known plenty of couples who choose to ignore budding problems or dissatisfactions because it's easier in the moment. But too much of that for long enough, and you all of a sudden have a huge problem on your hands, or a midlife crisis, or a broke...
