It's easy to want to be an author. You see it in your mind with sun streaming through windows and a Siamese cat purring on an antique rug and a little pellet stove and somehow the bills are paid and there's wit and self-sufficiency and divine inspira...
Maybe there’s a heaven, like they say, a place where everything we’ve ever done is noted and recorded, weighed on big karma scales. Maybe not. Maybe this whole thing is just a giant experiment run by aliens who find out human hijinks amusing. Or ...
I can’t overstate how little I knew about myself at 22, or how little I’d thought about what I was doing. When I graduated from college I genuinely believed that the creative life was the apex of human existence, and that to work at an ordinary o...
There is nothing wrong with being Human. What is wrong is how so many take for granted the gift of our being human and never learn that we are also to be HUMANE, hence our HUMANITY. We are born Man but it takes years of education, trial and error to ...
For so long, maybe all my life, I thought only a house could make you whole. I thought I was nothing without an interesting address. I thought I was only as good as my color scheme, my drawer pulls, my floors....it's the knowledge that a house can be...
Love is a figment of our imagination; becoming whatever we wish it to be. We customized our feelings to control love, resembling a wind being tossed about whichever way it suits us. Love is a game for the fittest, if you are weak at heart it will des...
When he came home early, he was dreary. There, he'd sit by the fireplace, his worn hands gripping the newspaper a bit too tight, his eyes held to it, unseeing, towards the words, the meaningless grouping of letters on that newspaper. The fire would c...
People that hold onto hate for so long do so because they want to avoid dealing with their pain. They falsely believe if they forgive they are letting their enemy believe they are a doormat. What they don’t understand is hatred can’t be isolated ...
Nobody sees it happening, but the architecture of our time Is becoming the architecture of the next time. And the dazzle Of light upon the waters is as nothing beside the changes Wrought therein, just as our waywardness means Nothing against the stea...
It's all a matter of perception. What one person deems to be important may be just as equally unimportant to another. What one deems to be right may seem very wrong to someone else. Your moral compass and values may not always be totally in sync with...
My cousin Helen, who is in her 90s now, was in the Warsaw ghetto during World War II. She and a bunch of the girls in the ghetto had to do sewing each day. And if you were found with a book, it was an automatic death penalty. She had gotten hold of a...
I was finally beginning to perceive that no matter how many dead people I might see, or people at the instant of their death, I would never manage to grasp death, that very moment, precisely in itself. It was one thing or the other: either you are de...
There are those who don’t believe in God and yet do good. There are those who believe in God and kill for that belief; those who prepare for war because they claim they want peace, and so on. So one has to ask oneself what need there is to believe ...
And sometimes if I want To imagine I’m a lamb (Or a whole flock Spreading out all over the hillside So I can be a lot of happy things at the same time), It’s only because I feel what I write at sunset, Or when a cloud passes its hand over the lig...
Birthdays were wretched, delicious things when you lived in Beau Rivage. The clock stuck midnight, and presents gave way to magic. Curses bloomed. Girls bit into sharp apples instead of birthday cake, chocked on the ruby-and-white slivers, and collap...
There are those who say that spiritual enlightenment is achieved through the denial of oneself; you must deny yourself many things, go and live in a mountaintop, never mingle with other people, talk to the birds..but I say to you, why should you dism...
It's not very easy to grow up into a woman. We are always taught, almost bombarded, with ideals of what we should be at every age in our lives: "This is what you should wear at age twenty", "That is what you must act like at age twenty-five", "This i...
There is a relationship between the eye contacts we make and the perceptions that we create in our heads, a relationship between the sound of another's voice and the emotions that we feel in our hearts, a relationship between our movements in space a...
The will of God prevails. In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both *may* be, and one *must* be, wrong. God cannot be *for* and *against* the same thing at the same time. In the present civil war it is quite ...
You love because you want to need someone the way you did when you were a child, and have them need you too. You eat well because the intensity of taste reminds you of a need satisfied, a pain relieved. The finest paintings are nothing more than the ...
When you're born a light is switched on, a light which shines up through your life. As you get older the light still reaches you, sparkling as it comes up through your memories. And if you're lucky as you travel forward through time, you'll bring the...
