Are we alone? Over time, you will come up with various answers to that same nagging question. Eventually one day it will occur to you that this endless asking is the answer you have been looking for. The fact that we have an ongoing dialogue with the...
I asked Elsie how much food they needed from outside the community. 'Flour and sugar,' she said, and then thought a bit. 'Sometimes we'll buy pretzels as a splurge.' It crossed my mind that the world's most efficient psychological evaluation would ha...
She was a nightmare of beauty and menace living right there above them, a being part raptor, part human, part divine. She knew without question that she could sweep down on them and inflict upon all of them a terrible vengeance if she wished. She had...
To refer even in passing to unpublished or struggling authors and their problems is to put oneself at some risk, so I will say here and now that any unsolicited manuscripts or typescripts sent to me will be destroyed unread. You must make your way yo...
Straight people don't have to come out, as heterosexuality is assumed. [...] Young straight people are less likely to question the choices that their families and societies are attempting to make for them. [...]A lot of straight people move through l...
To be, or not to be: that is the question: Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep; No more; and, by a sleep to say...
The complexities of adult life get in the way of the truth. The great philosophers have always been able to clear away the complexities and see simple distinctions - simple once they are stated, vastly difficult before. If we are to follow them we to...
Confession: Having kids did not fix me. I was not somehow more whole, less botched-up, or more certain just because I had a kid... I was still me, with all my holes and problems and questions - only now I was also exhuasted and had a lot more laundry...
It has often been said that the more unusual the murder the easier it is to solve, but this is a theory I don't believe. Nothing is easy, nothing is simple, and you should think of your investigations as a complicated experiment: look at what remains...
If you put any effort into anything you do and have a strong sense of self to the point where you don’t even question your choices before you walk out of the house— you’re a fucking weirdo.
For it is just this question of pain that parts us. So long as visible or audible pain turns you sick; so long as your own pains drive you; so long as pain underlies your propositions about sin,—so long, I tell you, you are an animal, thinking a li...
Past and history are not the same. Past is what happened. It consists of events that affected the patient's self, some of which he can remember, but the most he is having trouble remembering. History is transforming the past to a story that the perso...
I had a dream about you where you were an economic hero. So is the real life you like the dream you? Answer this question: If Paul Krugman and Ben Bernanke were about to die, and they only had 59 seconds left, and you could only save one, would you t...
By then I wasn't just asking questions; I was being changed by them. I was being changed by my prayers, which dwindled down nearer and nearer to silence, which weren't confrontations with God but with the difficulty--in my own mind, or in the human l...
Thus was their relationship born on the swift kiss of a pun. Neither suspected what the other would become to each of them. Like phrases running wild in the Logos, they knew neither who nor by what mechanism nor for what reason they were whistled for...
The barber's assistant asks if I am a Swede. An American? Not that either. A Russian? Well, then, what are you? I love to answer such nationalistically tinted questions with a steely silence, and to leave people who ask me about my patriotic feelings...
The way of Jesus cannot be imposed or mapped — it requires an active participation in following Jesus as he leads us through sometimes strange and unfamiliar territory, in circumstances that become clear only in the hesitations and questionings, in...
As followers of Christ, we are to be careful not to remain victims of the many cultural presuppositions of who he is, and what he teaches, insofar as taking for granted our own caricatures of him. Let it boil in both mind and heart the question, 'If ...
I do not know whether it came from his own innate depravity or from the promptings of his master, but he was rude enough to set a dog at me. Neither dog nor man liked the look of my stick, however, and the matter fell through. Relations were strained...
My sense of self has expanded and contracted like a schizophrenic accordion. I have questioned everything, and I have felt nothing. I have told the universe to f**k off, and I have fallen down weeping at its compassionate response.
How came she by her death? How came she there? Was she slain by accident, or had she met with violence? were the questions that pressed upon our thoughts. But we said little then and after a time left her where we found her. It mattered not to her th...
