Pamela Landy: What? Ward Abbott: I know how you're feeling. You lost two men in Berlin and you want it to mean something, but nothing Bourne gives you will bring your men back. Nothing in those files makes their sacrifice worthwile. You have to let g...
I liked his attention. But I also felt like there was something sick and wrong about it. Like it might make me sick later. I thought of my grandmother, my father's mother. How when I used to visit her in Georgia she would always let me eat all the co...
When we read, we decide when, where, how long, and about what. One of the few places on earth that it is still possible to experience an instant sense of freedom and privacy is anywhere you open up a good book and begin to read. When we read silently...
In my opinion it is not the writer's job to solve such problems as God, pessimism, etc; his job is merely to record who, under what conditions, said or thought what about God or pessimism. The artist is not meant to be a judge of his characters and w...
One minute you are here and the next moment you are some place else, some time a long ago. That is the thing about your mind. Memories. Everything still exists in the folds of your brain; you may try to forget or honestly believe that you have forgot...
HAPPINESS is a choice. We all seem to be chasing it. It starts with us! True happiness is a gift that we give to ourselves, but it is also a gift that we pass to others. True happiness radiates from us and affects those around us…so the gift just k...
At times, the confident lose confidence, the patient lose their cool, the generous act selfish, and the knowledgeable second guess what they know. And guess what? We’re all human. We all make mistakes, we lose our tempers, and we get caught off gua...
When I observe Gram, I see how fragile the notion of tradition can be. If I take my eyes off the way she kneads her Easter bread, or if I fail to study the way she sews a seam in suede, or if I lose the mental image I have of her when she negotiates ...
Am I corrupted if I believe that the people who think alike are more admirable and estimable than those who think for themselves? If no one thought differently, then where would our innovations come from? How would we ever advance beyond the status q...
Science Fiction properly conceived, like all serious fiction, however funny, is a way of trying to describe what is going on, what people actually do and feel, how people relate to everything else in this vast sack, this belly of the universe, this w...
I’m awful about your name. I still jump when I hear it. I still feel it rattling somewhere in my stomach. I think I’m jealous of anyone that gets to say it because it’s not my right anymore. Years from now I’ll be standing in a supermarket an...
Identify your Radar – it’s your brain functioning optimally; not a vague intuition or cosmic sixth sense. Train your Radar in key areas like: evaluating people, personal safety, healthy relationships, physical and mental well-being, money and cre...
They went forth to battle, but they always fell; Their eyes were fixed above the sullen shields; Nobly they fought and bravely, but not well, And sank heart-wounded by a subtle spell. They knew not fear that to the foeman yields, They were not weak, ...
Around the time my first marriage of twenty-one years was ending, I had spent a lot of time reflecting on the fairytale promises of living "happily ever after and being "forever in love." I thought about how the expectations of our families, friends,...
A hundred years or more, she's bent her crown in storm, in sun, in moonsplashed midnight breeze. surviving all the random vagaries of this harsh world. A dense - twigged veil drifts down from crown along her trunk - mourning slow wood that rustles ta...
It makes me sick, the way sadness is addicting. The way I can’t stop. Sadness is familiar. It’s comfortable and it’s easy in a sense that it comes naturally to me. But everything else about it is hard. The way my body aches with self-hatred. Th...
You still have friends who love you. It does not matter how many you have. All that matters is that someone thinks about you. A friend who cares for you. That is all you need. Do not commit suicide and do not cut just because someone does not say the...
And before you say this is all far-fetched, just think how far the human race has come in the past ten years. If someone had told your parents, for example, that they would be able to carry their entire music library in their pocket, would they have ...
How many of us would ever explore the dark extremities of our own humanity were we not from time to time thrown into them involuntarily? 'Necessity is laid upon me,' wrote the apostle Paul; and mostly it is only of necessity, through the inescapabili...
There exists a great uncertainty that comes with life. It is like a tree, its roots formed below the surface, its body penetrating a layer of top soil, its roots spreading outward, and affecting the domain it inhabits. With this natural uncertainty o...
The world, whatever we might think about it terrified by its vastness and by our helplessness in the face of it, embittered by its indifference to individual suffering—of people, animals, and perhaps also plants, for how can we be sure that plants ...
