Anger at happenstance for its absurd timing. Anger at myself for being so angry. I hate being angry and every time I got this angry it made me more angry at the fact that I was so angry. I realized though that I couldn't really be mad at any of those...
I wondered how long it took for a baby to become yours, for familiarity to set in. Maybe as long as it took a new car to lose that scent, or a brand-new house to gather dust. Maybe that was the process more commonly described as bonding: the act of l...
We need to not let food master us and take the throne of our lives. We need to make food submit to us, rather than us submitting to food. No one can serve two masters. We cannot serve money and God, and we cannot serve food and God.
Martin Van Buren was a shitty guy. Not just because he was a bad president, and not just because he was pro-slavery. Van Buren was shitty in a very general sort of way. And with all that that implies.
As my son Frankie put it, Humanism has changed the Twenty-third Psalm: They began - I am my shepherd. Then - Sheep are my shepherd. Then - Everything is my shepherd. Finally - Nothing is my shepherd.
The ironic fact is that humanism which began with man's being central eventually had no real meaning for people. On the other hand, if one begins with the Bible's position that man is created by God and in the image of God, there is a basis for that ...
If you have one dollar and I have a hundred dollars, I could say I have a hundred times the amount of money you do. And while that's true, it makes me sound wealthy and you sound poor, when the reality is we're both broke.
There was the honour and austerity of money as he walked through art galleries, as he saw around him the collections of oil paintings by dead men, lit so carefully that warmth seemed to emanate from within - and not because their art was loved or und...
They had studied law, information technology and art history as part of their beauty treatment, they had let Norwegian taxpayers finance years at university just so that they could end up as overqualified, stay-at-home playthings and sit here exchang...
You've still got to work toward your goal. Educate yourself. Make plans. Network with peers and colleagues. Join groups related to your goal or aspiration. You've got to put yourself into a position to succeed and then get out of the way. Allow it to...
A few years ago, Tor Wager, a neuroscientist at Columbia University, wanted to figure out why placebos were so effective. His experiment was brutally straightforward: he gave college students electric shocks while they were stuck in an fMRI machine. ...
The prospect of future lives in remote heavens as a compensation for the inadequacy of our present lives is a bad tradeoff for losing out on the present.
And I say, I crash in to things in the dark Even when the lights are on And I am wrong more often than I am writing And even then, I am often wrong But when my friends are in the bathroom at the bar Rolling dollar bills in to telescopes, Claiming the...
We all have our own stories. The story you tell about yourself, even if you only tell it to yourself, drives your actions and has a significant impact on your focus.
When my mother passed away several years ago—well, wait a minute. Actually, she didn’t ‘pass away.’ She died. Something about that verb, ‘to pass away’ always sounds to me as if someone just drifted through the wallpaper. No, my mother di...
The worse the country, the more tortured it is by water and wind, the more broken and carved, the more it attracts fossil hunters, who depend on the planet to open itself to us. We can only scratch away at what natural forces have brought to the surf...
She needs a new journal. The one she has is problematic. To get to the present, she needs to page through the past, and when she does, she remembers things, and her new journal entries become, for the most part, reactions to the days she regrets, wan...
There is a time in life when you expect the world to be always full of new things. And then comes a day when you realise that is not how it will be at all. You see that life will become a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there ...
There’s only one Earth, and it’s tiny, but evil human leaders avoid problems they don’t want to resolve by giving them names which make the problems sound like they’re taking place in a different world: they make people not care about other p...
You’re virtually unknown over in the States. This could be the thing that helps you crack America. I can just see it now, a picture of you reclining in a pair of tighty whiteys advertising for Calvin Klein on the side of a skyscraper.” “Fuck, m...
I am praetor of the legion," Reyna said. "I judge this to be in the best interest of Rome." "To get yourself killed? To break our oldest laws and travel to the Ancient Lands? How will you even find their ship, assuming you survive the journey?" [Octa...
