When I started researching airline stewardesses, I found that the topic made for amusing cocktail party banter. “You’re writing a book about that? Wow, what fun!” Yes, it was fun, but it was also serious history. Pretty women do not fit into wh...
In serving as a pastor for over thirty years, I have seen some remarkable transformations and I’ve seen some big disappointments. I have two observations. First, where there has been lasting change, the common factor, in every case, is that the Wor...
When you're unhappy, you get to pay a lot of attention to yourself. And you get to take yourself oh so very seriously. Your truly happy people, which is to say, your people who truly like themselves, they don't think about themselves very much. Your ...
When you're socially awkward, you're isolated more than usual, and when you're isolated more than usual, your creativity is less compromised by what has already been said and done. All your hope in life starts to depend on your craft, so you try to p...
I often ask myself, 'Who would Jesus vote for?' Then I start to think that he wouldn't vote at all; however, it would not be out of apathy or disinterest, but out of perfection and light. As a miracle worker, I think he would, by the power of God's t...
Mal was quiet for a long moment. Then he said, “I’m not sure who my first kill was. We were hunting the stag when we ran into a Fjerdan patrol on the northern border. I don’t think the fight lasted more than a few minutes, but I killed three me...
Distance can ruin even the best of intentions. But I suppose it depends on how you look at it. Distance just adds a richness you would not otherwise get. People come. People go. They will drift in and out of your life, almost like characters in a fav...
If you focus your mind on problem, the problem would become bigger and bigger and you get into the circle of worrying and then your mind gives you the false impression that the problem is very big and mind than start multiplying your worries without ...
Now, quite apart from the fact that, from the point of view of the Earther, socialism suffers the devastating liability of only exhibiting internal contradictions when you are trying to use it as an adjunct to your own stupidity (unlike capitalism, w...
Seeing yourself as part of a creative lineage will help you feel less alone as you start making your own stuff. I hang pictures of my favourite artists in my studio. They're like friendly ghosts. I can almost feel them pushing me forward as I'm hunch...
The first morning I really sat and watched him it was a Tuesday. I know that because Tuesday is trash day for our neighborhood. Unlike me, he leaves gathering up his trash for the morning of pickup instead of doing it the night before. My alarm went ...
I start to see that I surround myself with broken people; more broken than me. Ah, yes, let me count your cracks. Let's see, one hundred, two... yes, you'll do nicely. A cracked companion makes me look more whole, gives me something outside myself to...
This was maybe the first time she’d done it when she’d felt the true intimacy of it. The first time she’d done it because she wanted to express her feelings for a guy in some new way she hadn’t before. The first time it meant something. The f...
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...
Perhaps this is the purpose of detective investigations, real and fictional -- to transform sensation, horror and grief into a puzzle, and then to solve the puzzle, to make it go away. 'The detective story,' observed Raymond Chandler in 1949, 'is a t...
Every November on National Adoption Day, courts set aside time to finalize adoptions from foster care that might otherwise be delayed for months, and communities celebrate adoption with retreats, proclamations, and other events. National Adoption Day...
Of all the questions we leave unanswered the one that comes back to haunt us the most is :"What if…" What if I'd married my college sweetheart? What if I had the good sense not to? What if I had been born in this job market? What if... What if I'd ...
Our first point of discussion is the hunt. (...) My idea is to start the film with an image of the vixen locked out of her lair which has been plugged up. Her terror as she's pursued across the country. This is a big deal. It means training a fox fro...
'Sugar, aint you ever had no good time?' she said with a bit of sadness in her voice. 'What you mean?' Sugar said,... 'Seems to me that I ain't never see you look up from whatever you were doing and just smile.' 'Just smile? Smile at what? At who?' '...
There are more guys than girls in jazz. Next-to-no lady trumpeters (oh, there are a few) but it doesn't matter because, for me, jazz trumpet is all about one guy Miles Davis. He made this famous album in 1959 called Kind of Blue which is kind of, alw...
The Qur’an sought to reform, not to destroy and start from scratch, to salvage what was useful and then to modify and build on it. The task was to get the Arabs to think about religion in a novel way, to inculcate in them a new conceptual frame of ...
