And I thought, eight years ago, when I began carefully charting the progress of American Gods, nervously dipping my toes into the waters of blogging, would I have imagined a future in which, instead of recording the vicissitudes of bringing a book in...
For his thirtieth birthday he had filled a whole night-club off Regent Street; people had been queuing on the pavement to get in. The SIM card of his mobile phone in his pocket was overflowing with telephone numbers of all the hundreds of people he h...
At the time, I didn't know what forgiveness meant. I wouldn't really know what forgiveness meant for another year, until my pastor, Rick McKinley, happened to spell it out in a sermon. He said that when you forgive, you bear the burden somebody has g...
Asif Ali maneuvers the gleaming Mercedes down the labyrinthine lanes of Old Kolkata with consummate skill, but his passengers do not notice how smoothly he avoids potholes, cows and beggars, how skilfully he sails through aging yellow lights to get t...
True law, the code of justice, the essence of our sensations of right and wrong, is the conscience of society. It has taken thousands of years to develop, and it is the greatest, the most distinguishing quality which has developed with mankind ... If...
I'd seen him around town for a year or so before he made a move on me. I'd heard good and bad things about him. One friend said he was just out for sex. Another said he was a romantic at heart. What the hell, I thought. I needed sex and romance in my...
I didn't really have an interest in politics when I first entered the workforce. What I wanted to do was help people who grew up like me. When I was a kid growing up in Tucson, my father lost his job and we lost everything - including our home. We li...
I have not yet lost a feeling of wonder, and of delight, that this delicate motion should reside in all the things around us, revealing itself only to him who looks for it. I remember, in the winter of our first experiments, just seven years ago, loo...
Everything goes, everything comes back; eternally rolls the wheel of being. Everything dies, everything blossoms again; eternally runs the year of being. Everything breaks, everything is joined anew; eternally the same House of Being is built. Everyt...
For nearly four years you have had an Administration which instead of twirling its thumbs has rolled up its sleeves. We will keep our sleeves rolled up. We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace--business and financial monopoly, speculation, r...
That’s crazy,” Gabriel said. “We must be seventy million years in the past.” “Nearly a hundred and twenty-five million,” Ohin said. “It seems far, but time is really interrelational. Every moment is just as far from every other. “Righ...
I truly am %100 convinced that, if you want to raise knights and noble women, you must teach your children the philosophies of old. I have been teaching my son ancient philosophies since he was nine years old. It becomes a thought pattern, a way of l...
The great triumph (or horrible tragedy, depending on how you look at it) of being human is that our brains have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to understand our mortality. We are, sadly, self-aware creatures. Even if we move through the ...
From then on, as long as I was at Ault, I would never be alone. Martha and I would get along, our friendship would last. I felt certainty and relief. Years later, I heard a minister at a wedding describe marriage as cutting sorrow in half and doublin...
One of the most striking results of modern investigation has been the way in which several different and quite independent lines of evidence indicate that a very great event occurred about two thousand million years ago. The radio-active evidence for...
A mosaic of memories takes me back to my own childhood, and then to my children. My earliest memory of St. Augustine was a day trip from Jacksonville; a day with some neighbors who were nice enough to purchase me a plastic toy-tugboat with a blue sup...
Fables should be taught as fables, myths as myths, and miracles as poetic fancies. To teach superstitions as truths is a most terrible thing. The child mind accepts and believes them, and only through great pain and perhaps tragedy can he be in after...
Many years later he looked through one of my books and said, "How did you learn all this, Isaac?" "From you, Pappa", I said. "From me? I don't know any of this". "You didn't have to, Pappa", I said. "You valued learning and you taught me to value it....
You know when I was 20 and 30, they were insecurities. Now they're just a new normal. I'm 60 years old, so my expectations of who I am and how I look and how I show up in the world had to shift. Not because I couldn't help it, or not because I did an...
During the Government’s recent overhaul of GCSEs, I was asked to join a consultative group advising on the English Literature syllabus. It quickly became clear that the minister wanted to prescribe two Shakespeare plays for every 16-year-old in the...
Every day it got swept. All of the dirt each piece of dust and even the tiniest bread crumb of secret midnight snacks. It lay under that rug. Years went by nobody noticed it’s more defeated crumbled appearance with all the misshaped lumps and bumps...
