It must be one of life’s little jokes... how we take everything, even life itself, for granted. We waste our childhoods wishing for what we don’t have, longing for the future, dreaming of ways to speed the time so we can hurry up and see the worl...
I lay there for three whole days, totally paralyzed. My friends helped me to the bathroom and anywhere else I needed to move; but I have very vague impressions of those days because it was a time of complete darkness for me. Somebody told me later th...
The worst fear in the hearings was that you would get some evil interrogator: you could never know what might happen then. No one who lives in a free country will ever understand that kind of fear. What is most horrifying is the realization that you ...
It stank pretty bad, of course: manure was caked all over the wagon. But we were free. Right then I was elated with a sense of how faithful God is to his promises; I was free, and I was smiling joyfully on a manure wagon. As we ambled along, I laughe...
Carlyle's genius was many-sided. He touched and ennobled the national life at all points. He lifted a whole generation of young men out of the stagnating atmosphere of materialism and dead orthodoxy into the region of the ideal. With the Master of Ba...
She stared at herself in the mirror. Her eyes were dark, almost black, filled with pain. She'd let someone do that to her. She'd known all along she felt things too deeply. She became attached. She didn't want a lover who could walk away from her, be...
Those women who had gone out with Germans were grabbed and treated very badly, often shaved totally bald so that everyone could see who they were. Some were taken prisoners. There had been so much suffering during the war because of the betrayal of t...
Words stand between silence and silence: between the silence of things and the silence of our own being. Between the silence of the world and the silence of God. When we have really met and known the world in silence, words do not separate us from th...
If I had a necklace made out of tiny suns, I’d only wear it at night when you could really see it. Sadly, I don’t have a necklace like that. The closest thing I have is a necklace made out of those glow in the dark stars you stick to bedroom ceil...
What’s going on?” Royce asked as throngs of people suddenly moved toward him from the field and the castle interior. “I mentioned that you saw the thing and now they want to know what it looks like,” Hadrian explained. “What did you think? ...
Life is like a film screen: pictures come, make an impression, go, and then make a place for new pictures with new impressions which obscure the previous ones. Some of those old pictures fade, but the impressions they leave will never pass away. Such...
Heavy laden -- that's what I am. Laden with pride, often thinking myself better than others while we have to think the other one better than ourselves. Laden with my own egotism. Laden with all my sins. And when I went to bed last night and thought a...
I had to be at work at 8 am this morning, so I set my alarm clock for 7:49. Naturally, my body woke my brain up at 1:11 precisely, and I laid in bed trying to convince myself two things: one, that I function better on little sleep, and two, that I am...
If you supplied me a tissue, I wouldn’t need it because I wouldn’t feel like crying. But if you withhold it, you’ll make me sad and you’ll make me cry, thus causing me to need the very thing you won’t give me. So if you give it to me, I won...
It's possible that the chief of trauma surgery has things backwards. It's possible, even likely, that for all military medicine contributes to specialized skilks, it actually detracts from civilian medicine be diverting resources, research, and perso...
My name is growing all the time, and I’ve lived a very long, long time; so my name is like a story. Real names tell you the story of the things they belong to in my language, in the Old Entish as you might say. It is a lovely language, but it takes...
Success, as we categorize it, is a simple and pitiable thing. It's only a matter of degree of wanting, and accident. Wanting plays the major role in everybody's life--accident all the others. The only condition any of us can be sure of in this univer...
If it is the case that we are merely slaves to the natural processes computing our advanced fight and flight responses, then we are never truly thinking, which means that logic and reason - the things we hold so dear - do not exist either.
The scientific method gives us information by testing and repeating observable things so that we can find the rules for the way that the universe generally works. But if you were to try and use it to prove that Henry VIII had six wives, you would be ...
We fitted together like the two halves of an oyster-shell. I was Narcissus, embracing the pond in which I was about to drown. However much we had to hide our love, however guarded we had to be about our pleasure, I could not long be miserable about a...
I wake up in the morning and I see that flower, with the dew on its petals, and at the way it's folding out, and it makes me happy, she said. It's important to focus on the things in the here and now, I think. In a month, the flower will be shriveled...
