We didn't do anything wrong, but among the lessons learned, given the magnitude of the problems we now face in Afghanistan, a major U.S. force on the ground would convince the world we were in for the long-haul recovery of a country devastated by 21 ...
What if the slowdown in merger activity isn't cyclical, but secular? What if corporations have learned the lessons of so many companies before them that the odds of a successful merger are no better than 50-50 and probably less? Is it possible that t...
Failure people deal with life's disappointment whereas the real people ride on disappointment to take the best lesson out of it to understand the character of persons they had in their network then. Dealing is another term of striking compromises wit...
One or a couple of good thoughts may be a fluke or derived from life’s challenges, a few can be a practice or a lesson from failures and bad experiences but the consistency of excellent quotes is certainly a mark of an excellence that being prepare...
When we make appreciation the central theme of our value system, then all the painful elements of our past become meaningful lessons we could not have done without. Acceptance becomes natural when we become adept at finding the silver lining, even in...
Discussions of the economy, especially during times of crisis, are often framed in terms of lessons we supposedly learned during the Depression of the 1930s. If we are not to endure terrible times like those again, we are told, we must support whatev...
What I had to face, the very bitter lesson that everyone who wants to write has got to learn, was that a thing may in itself be the finest piece of writing one has ever done, and yet have absolutely no place in the manuscript one hopes to publish.
this is thy hour o soul, thy free flight into the wordless, away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done, thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best, night, sleep, death and the stars.
I believe that a writer learns from every story he writes, and when you try different things, you learn different lessons. Working with other writers, as in Hollywood or in a shared world series, will also strengthen your skills, by exposing you to n...
I think I'm still chewing on my years as a foreign correspondent. I found myself covering catastrophes - war, uprising, famine, refugee crises - and witnessing how people were affected by dire situations. When I find a story from the past, I bring so...
I do not have it in for relativism. In many respects I find it a fascinating, even attractive, alternative. It engenders epistemological humility, defeats an arrogant pomposity in belief, even promotes a sort of democratic ideal in matters of knowled...
You think that holding someone hard will bring them closer. You think that you can hold them so hard that you'll still feel them, embossed on you, when you pull away. Every time Eleanor pulled away from Park, she felt the gasping loss of him.
We are hard-wired to engage with those we trust, and this hard-wiring has led to a constant push for greater interaction and connection on the Web.
When someone is force to realize that the road he'd been working hard to make progress on was no different from the place he'd started, and when he realized that he had in fact gone backward, all that person can do is face the pale sky and lament.
I've spent most of my life and most of my friendships holding my breath and hoping that when people get close enough they won't leave, and fearing that it's a matter of time before they figure me out and go.
Public and civic value require commitment and hard work among the core group of participants. It also requires that these groups be self-governing and submit to constraints that help them ignore distracting and entertaining material and stay focused ...
I used to help my grandfather on the farm, driving tractors, raising crops and animals. I used to feed some of the baby cows and pigs, and I had to be no older than 7 or 8. Then at about 9 or 10 I started driving tractors. It showed me at an early ag...
It is not possible to be original by trying to be original - those who attempt this in the arts will be merely avant-garde. Originality is the product of an impulse to intense and overwhelming that it bursts the conventions and produces something new...
When you have those moments just think of me, call or text me when you feel weak and I will always be there for you. Nothing about this will be easy, life is hard, we just feel it more than most because our souls have been broken and are raw.
I had a dream about you. We were traveling in your car. You were driving, and I was securely fastened by ropes and duct tape in the trunk. I tried telling you my family has no money, but you had to find out the hard way.
Where are we going?" asked Victor. "If I'm allowed to ask." I squirmed around in my seat so that I could look him in the eye. "That's what you're going to tell us. As hard as it is to believe, we didn't do all that just because we missed your pleasan...
