A teenager deserves a library that recognizes reality. He needs an information source and study area that does not impose arbitrary, crippling rules on him. His library should recognize that dignity and silence are not prior requisites to learning [�...
I find funny that altho no one is perfect, we constantly compare ourselves to others. Judging others by their appearance and wealth, assuming that they're happier than us. History shows that human's will never be fully satisfied. Even those who seem ...
Destructive and irresponsible freedom has been granted boundless space. Society appears to have little defense against the abyss of human decadence, such as, for example, misuse of liberty for moral violence against young people, motion pictures full...
My body is a political battlefield. It is a place of war, of death and suffering, of triumph and victory, of damage and repair, of blood and tears and sweat. It is a place where memories go to find purpose for their existence. It is a place where hum...
The human heart is the first home of democracy. It is where we embrace our questions. Can we be equitable? Can we be generous? Can we listen with our whole beings, not just our minds, and offer our attention rather than our opinions? And do we have e...
I owe a huge debt to Anaïs Nin, because I fell into her diaries, essays, and collected letters in my Twenties and Thirties like a fish falling into water. She was, in some ways, a deeply flawed human being, and perhaps she makes a strange kind of he...
I want to live simply. I want to sit by the window when it rains and read books I'll never be tested on. I want to paint because I want to, not because I've got something to prove. I want to listen to my body, fall asleep when the moon is high and wa...
morality means giving common concerns or the wellbeing of others as much weight as one’s own self-interest. Moral behaviour in this sense can be found in any society, because it is the glue that sticks individuals together and so makes society poss...
We are raised to believe (on the surface, at least) that us humans only have so much love to give, and that it comes in a standard round unit: one. After all, we associate love with the heart, and, well, you've either got a whole heart, or you're dea...
We cannot seem to help ourselves they said. Thus, the hominid spark of intelligence flares, burns everything around it, and fades. Some humans will survive the great conflagration. Thus, begins an endless cycle of destruction spiraling downward until...
I sometimes stare into fire or into the night sky alone and wish for a girl or my situation to be different. I also then think why would god who created the beautiful Earth let Humans suffer and act the way they do. But I then realize that god has le...
Don’t turn your face away. Once you’ve seen, you can no longer act like you don’t know. Open your eyes to the truth. It’s all around you. Don’t deny what the eyes to your soul have revealed to you. Now that you know, you cannot feign ignora...
Peace is life. Love is life. No river holds a grudge against a rock in its path. No leaf refuses to blow in the breeze. No plant denies water or sunshine. We, as human beings, have the gift of self-awareness, but this gift quickly turns to self-destr...
My advice for aspiring writers is go to New York. And if you can’t go to New York, go to the place that represents New York to you, where the standards for writing are high, there are other people who share your dreams, and where you can talk, talk...
Can we be sure that they are incapable of the feelings or sentiments that are believed to place them on a lower scale than humans? Do we deny sensitivity to all of the so-called lower orders to blunt, protect, and, ultimately, deny our own? We will s...
That Detroit ultimately concentrated on automobiles could be traced to one genius, Henry Ford.... But that the necessary human energy for this development existed in Detroit could be proven through its early history.... I told him what I knew of the ...
What though the radiance which was once so bright Be now for ever taken from my sight, Though nothing can bring back the hour Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower; We will grieve not, rather find Strength in what remains behind; In the p...
You’re a prickly, stubborn, spirited woman.” “Don’t forget crude, rude, and vulgar.” “Only when it suits you. You’re sly when occasion calls for it, direct to the point of forgetting tact even exists, sarcastic, fierce, I did mention st...
Now and again, one could detect in a childless woman of a certain age the various characteristics of all the children she had never issued. Her body was haunted by the ghost of souls who hadn't lived yet. Premature ghosts. Half-ghosts. X's without Y'...
In a society so estranged from animals as ours, we often fail to credit them with any form of language. If we do, it comes under the heading of communication rather than speech. And yet, the great silence we have imposed on the rest of life contains ...
When you find yourself in one of those mystical/devotional frames of mind or in am emergency and you feel you want to pray, then pray. Don’t ever be ashamed to pray or feel prevented by thinking yourself unworthy in any way. Fact is whatever terrib...
