We live in a culture that has, for centuries now, cultivated the idea that the skeptical person is always smarter than the one who believes. You can be almost as stupid as a cabbage, as long as you doubt. The fashion of the age has identified mental ...
But the more you thing about it, I think the best songwriter is the one who makes you feel like you are in the best place in the world when you are listening to his or her songs. The one who makes you understand yourself a little better when your ear...
It's not odd these days to hear politicians trumpeting their own authenticity, a claim that an earlier day would have considered self-cancelling. But when Michelle Bachman, Rick Perry, and Rick Santorum say "I'm authentic," they're not evoking the sh...
When I first accepted my own death, the world was intantly changed. It was a completely new sensation. It took something like this to finally open my eyes. Before, I had simply shut myself off so that I could not see, could not hear. What had I been ...
Oh, they'll never believe a woman could solve such puzzles. They'll just assume I'm humoring you by editing it myself and allowing you to put your name to it." She raised her eyebrows. "But you wouldn't be." He humphed. "They'll never hear me admit i...
I'll find you, Will!" Then the wind filled the big, square sail of the wolfship and she heeled away from the shore, moving faster and faster towards the northeast. For a long time after she'd dropped below the horizon, the sodden figure sat there, hi...
If this is my final moment,” she says, “then I can die happy.” “Is that why you’re saying all this? Because you think we’re going to die?” “I don’t know,” she admits. “Dammit, Summer.” He clings to her waist, grip desperate, e...
Look, I'm not going to have sex with him just so he'll say that he loves me, you know?" ...That isn't why I was planning to have sex with Rob - to hear the words, I mean. I just wanted to get it over with. I think. Actually, I'm not sure why it seeme...
There is always a place where, if you listen closely in the night, you will hear a mother telling a story and at the end of the tale, she will ask you this question: 'Ou libéré?' Are you free, my daughter?" My grandmother quickly pressed her finger...
What good the prophet in the wilderness may do is incremental and personal. It's good for us to hear someone speak the irrational truth. It's good for us when, in spite of all of the sober, pragmatic, and even correct arguments that war is sometimes ...
PLEASE TELL ME YOU KNOW OF SYLVIA PLATH Conventions bleed my soul squeeze me old wear me grey like a headstone in transit. It’s tradition and form— fear of the unknown— driving me dead in tight spaces darkly. I cry aloud but who can hear when I...
We all have an inner voice, our personal whisper from the universe. All we have to do is listen -- feel and sense it with an open heart. Sometimes it whispers of intuition or precognition. Other times, it whispers an awareness, a remembrance from ano...
The crow cawed again overhead, and a strong sea wind came in and burst through the trees, making the green pine needles shake themselves all over the place. That sound always gave me goose bumps, the good kind. It was the sound an orphan governess he...
Angels of highest light and love, Angels that radiate beams of pure energy from the heavens above. Please join us and be with us on this very night, As the soul of our beloved joins you in flight. We pray that you send this soul embraced in your love...
Yet in Paul's letters we can hear something more than his own genius: an echo of female voices, of conversations over the years with the women of the Aegean cloth trade who were his close collaborators. During this long fellowship, the apostle has no...
This time his voice comes from the left and I hear his footfall moving around my body as I obey. Suddenly I am all limbs, stretching out to please him. I am absurdly vulnerable and beyond aroused. I want him now.
Do you want to go back to Vienna?” he said. Alec didn’t answer, just stared into space. “Or we could go somewhere else,” said Magnus. “Anywhere you want. Thailand, South Carolina, Brazil, Peru – Oh, wait, no, I’m banned from Peru. I’d...
The big kid hasn't said anything yet. 'I do like hearing myself talk,' I say, 'only because I have a lot of neat things to say, but eventually the conversation will run out in, like, four or five years, and then where will we be?' Wonder of all wonde...
He was one of those men, and they are not the commonest, of whom we can know the best only by following them away from the marketplace, the platform, and the pulpit, entering with them into their own homes, hearing the voice with which they speak to ...
The interior life expands and fills; it approaches the edge of skin; it thickens with its own vivid story; it even begins to hear rumors, from beyond the horizon skin’s rim, of nations and wars. You wake one day and discover your grandmother; you w...
Nice person, bad person -- that's not the level this girl is at. I can see you're crazy about her and probably won't be able to hear this, Ao-chan, but I think you'd be better off staying away from someone like her. I can't read her exactly, but I ca...
