Adversity is a school that you need not apply to be enrolled. It has no respect for age, wealth, education, race, power, fame or beauty. It is a school among schools and every human being passes through the school in one format or the other. It is al...
When something terrible happens, a lifetime of small events and unremarkable decisions, of unresolved anger, and unexplored fears begins to play itself out in ways you least expect. You've been going along from one day to the next, not realizing that...
Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back. That's part of what it means to be alive. But inside our heads - at least that's where I imagine it - there's a little room where we store those memories. A room like the stacks ...
Her tears fell abundantly--but her grief was so truly artless, that no dignity could have made it more respectable in Emma's eyes--and she listened to her and tried to console her with all her heart and understanding--really for the time convinced th...
You know, sometimes I don't understand what's wrong with us. This is just about the most creative and imaginative country on earth—and yet sometimes we just don't seem to have the gumption to exploit our intellectual property. We split the atom, an...
To my mind, ‘magic’ is the hard-to-define quality of the things that stir up mystical feelings like amazement, curiosity, imagination, and above all wonder. Magic is that which renders something beautiful in a spiritual sense. It is that which ma...
In the same way there is much, much in all of us, but we do not know it. No one ever calls it out in us, unless we are lucky enough to know intelligent, imaginative, sympathetic people who love us and have the magnanimity to encourage us, to believe ...
And once their imaginations are liberated, they begin glimpse the grand interconnectedness of all things. Eternity begins to peek out from behind the everyday things and they see the trappings of any earthly moment as the stage and props for Heaven t...
If a night-moth were to concentrate its will on flying to a star or some equally unattainable object, it wouldn't succeed. Only, it wouldn't even try in the first place. A moth confines its search to what has sense and value for it, what it needs, wh...
How I hated myself, thwarted, poisoned and tortured myself, made myself old and ugly. Never again, as I once fondly imagined, will I consider that Siddartha is clever. But one thing I have done well, which pleases me, which I must praise- I have now ...
Before the magisterial mess of Trevor Thomas's house, the orderly houses that most of us live in seem meagre and lifeless -- as, in the same way, the narratives called biographies pale and shrink in the face of the disorderly actuality that is a life...
There are 1.6 billion Muslims in the world. If, for the sake of argument, 1 million are violent, that's a mere .000625 percent of them. I wonder who among you wants to be judged on such a tiny minority. Further, at 1.6 billion, if all Muslims - or ev...
My father is the most genial Midwestern guy imaginable, but for him, disaster lurks around every corner—financial ruin, squandered health, pyramid schemes, airbags failing to deploy—so he tends to use fear as a parenting tool to try to goad his d...
Men love war because it allows them to look serious. Because they imagine it is the only thing that stops women laughing at them. In it they can reduce women to the status of objects. That is the great distinction between the sexes. Men see objects, ...
Christian: [after testing some explosives] Fuck! That was sick! Imagine if we use one of the big ones. His car will be blown to pieces. Elias: Whose car? Christian: That asshole, Lars. Elias: You want to blow up his car? Christian: Sure. Elias: Someo...
Idgie Threadgoode: One time, there this this lake [pause] Idgie Threadgoode: and uh, it was right outside of town. We used to go fishin' and swimmin' and canoein' in it, and uh [sniffle] Idgie Threadgoode: this one November this flock o'ducks came in...
Guido: I forgot to tell you. Dora: Go ahead. Guido: You can't imagine how much I feel like making love to you. But I'll never tell anyone, especially not you. They'd have to torture me to make me say it. Dora: Say what? Guido: That I want to make lov...
George: I have hated this house from the moment my father put it in my name. Imagine, 29 years of hating what you're living in, hating what you *are*. This is the end of it, Sam. I'm finally building something of my own. Something I can be proud to g...
Seth: Look at those nipples. Evan: They're like little baby toes. It's just not fair that they get to flaunt that stuff, you know... and like, I have to hide every erection I get. Evan: Just imagine if girls weren't weirded out by our boners and stuf...
Sheriff: [Talking to Tucker and Dale, after he's pulled them over] Where are you two headed? Tucker: We're headed to our vacation home up by Morris Lake. I sank every penny I had into it... me and Dale here, we're gonna' go fix her up, then do a litt...
Evey Hammond: [telling V about her experiences after she left him] I worried about myself for a while... but then one day I was a market and a friend, someone I'd worked with at the BTN, got in line behind me. I was so nervous that when the cashier a...
