He looked at Hector's list and told him that, thanks to a lot of studies and calculations, they'd shown that if you compared yourself to others and didn't find yourself wanting, if you had no money or health problems, if you had friends, a close-knit...
Once you change, change happens. This is a big lesson. Expecting someone else to change is like pleading with a manufacturer to turn Twinkies into a green smoothie. It makes no sense, right? Often times we feel people are purposely doing or not doing...
Rachel rolled her eyes as she let out a breath, "I've been to support groups. I've done the "my name is" thing." Rachel’s leg fell off the couch as she glared at Dr. Kean. "That's what triggered the attempts. I don't want to know that there are peo...
What makes humans human is precisely that they do not know the future. That is why they do the fateful and amusing things they do: who can say how anything will turn out? Therein lies the only hope for redemption, discovery, and-let’s be frank—fu...
The music glides between the pores of your skin to bubble through your veins in place of blood, and you can't help but clutch the mic with both trembling hands and let the song flow out of you like blood from a wound. In those moments, when the music...
From the vantage of a mid-1970's consensus that regarded the United States as having entered a post-Protestant era, the rise of a Religious Right dominated not only by Protestants but by fundamentalists was not the way the story was supposed to go. P...
July 15, 1991 Nita: Mv mother was a paragon of our neighborhood, People always come up to us with hugs, saying "You have the most wonderful mother." l'd think. “Don't you see what's going on in this house?” To this day, if somehow even in jest ra...
The scriptures present a God who delights in genocide, rape, slavery, and the execution of nonconformists, and for millennia those writings were used to rationalize the massacre of infidels, the ownership of women, the beating of children, dominion o...
Isaac basically knew just one thing for sure: Many are born, few flourish, all die. If you didn’t die as a sacrifice for God today, you would die of an incomprehensible plague tomorrow, or of undeserved starvation the day after, or of good old-fash...
One of my biggest weaknesses, one that has always shamed me, is that I have always been lonely. I've struggled to make friends because I can be socially awkward, because I'm weird, because I live in my head. When I was young, we moved around a lot, s...
... there was one new metallic monstrosity stacked in one corner that she hadn’t seen the last time she was a visitor to his strange chamber, it appeared to be a mass of hard drives all fused together, but they looked too sophisticated to be merely...
My cousin Roger once told me, on the eve of his third wedding, that he felt marriage was addictive. Then he corrected himself. I mean early marriage, he said. The very start of a marriage. It's like a whole new beginning. You're entirely brand-new pe...
Fyodor Pavlovitch was drunk when he heard of his wife's death, and the story is that he ran out into the street and began shouting with joy, raising his hands to Heaven: "Lord, now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace," but others say he wept wit...
Never be frightened at your own faint-heartedness in attaining love. Don't be frightened overmuch even at your evil actions. I am sorry I can say nothing more consoling to you, for love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dr...
Why did they all have to tread so very delicately around Celeste's money? It was like wealth was an embarrassing medical condition. It was the same with Celeste's beauty. Strangers gave Celeste the same furtive looks they gave to people with missing ...
I think the invitation offered the non-black reader is to join us in this expression of our familiarity and via that joining, come to understand that when black people come together to celebrate and rejoice in black critical thinking, we do so not to...
I don't believe in greatness that is bestowed as a rare gift to a few lucky ones. Rather, I think all people have greatness inside them. It is just a matter of persistence--sticking to what you have envisioned until it is reality. I have a deep convi...
She holds herself with such reserve. She smiles, but the smile doesn't reach her eyes, even in the company of the girls she's chosen to eat with. Why? I have no clue, and I really don't want to spend my time worrying about it. But my brain pushes at ...
I had uncovered a widely held but overlooked attachment: our attachment to the view that every problem must have a solution. We delude ourselves that we can think our way out of a problem or we see it as a matter of finding the right person to advise...
We tend to make adjustments in our lives to get by, to survive. Sometimes we don't actually heal. We make changes. We deny. We mask. We cover up. We hide things. I could not change the fact Shellie committed suicide while I was away no more than I co...
God doesn't like lesbians," Grandma Huberman hised, throwing the magazine in the trash. Jennifer knew what lesbian meant, and she knew she probably was one. But she couldn't understand why God would hold that against her or against Monica Mathers, wh...
