You see, the bodily resurrection of Jesus isn't a take-it-or-leave-it thing, as though some Christians are welcome to believe it and others are welcome not to believe it. Take it away, and the whole picture is totally different. Take it away, and Kar...
The nationalist, however loves his own kind as the extension of his family, realizing that universal values are primitive values or no values at all; that men can be free and content only within their native cultural environment. This profound insigh...
As he watched Joe stand, blazing, on the fire escape, Sammy felt an ache in his chest that turned out to be, as so often occurs when memory and desire conjoin with a transient effect of weather, the pang of creation. The desire he felt, watching Joe,...
Perhaps the most difficult thing about loving and helping an addict, which most people who haven't been through it don't understand, is this: every day the cycle continues is your new worst day. When looked at from the outside it seems endless, the s...
Modernity has abandoned the household gods, not because we have rejected the idolatry as all Christians must, but because we have rejected the very idea of the household. We no longer worship Vesta, but have only turned away from her because our home...
I call these lessons ‘learned on the fly’ because the knowledge gained from the experiences connected with them were very much akin to the spirit of the centerfielder in baseball running backward at full speed, looking towards the heavens, trying...
I shook my head. "I'm good, Nicky helped." Nicky looked at Edward. "She's having one of those what-if-killing-feels-really-good, doesn't-that-make-me-a-bad-person moments." Edward nodded as if that made perfect sense. "Then it feels good. We can't re...
In some aspects losing a child is like a wall, but instead of getting over it, you must carry the wall with you, wherever you go, for as long as you live. The wall is immovable. You can’t go anywhere until you learn to move the wall. You are just s...
No man, proclaimed Donne, is an Island, and he was wrong. If we were not islands, we would be lost, drowned in each other's tragedies. We are insulated (a word that means, literally, remember, made into an island) from the tragedy of others, by our i...
The next visit I paid to Nancy Brown was in the second week in March: for, though I had many spare minutes during the day, I seldom could look upon an hour as entirely my own; since, when everything was left to the caprices of Miss Matilda and her si...
Active Hope is not wishful thinking. Active Hope is not waiting to be rescued . . . . by some savior. Active Hope is waking up to the beauty of life on whose behalf we can act. We belong to this world. The web of life is calling us forth at this time...
For us to deem a work of architecture elegant, it is hence not enough that it look simple: we must feel that the simplicity it displays has been hard won, that it flows from the resolution of demanding technical or natural predicament. Thus we call t...
[Donald] Keene observed [in a book entitled The Pleasures of Japanese Literature, 1988] that the Japanese sense of beauty has long sharply differed from its Western counterpart: it has been dominated by a love of irregularity rather than symmetry, th...
[Artemis] returned to the aft bay for Mulch's version of a briefing. The dwarf had drawn a crude diagram on a backlit wall panel. In fairness, there were more artistic chimpanzees. And less pungent ones. Mulch was using a carrot as a pointer, or more...
A further reason for my hatred of . . . ideologies is quite a primitive one. I have an aversion to killing people for the fun of it. What the fun is, I did not quite understand at the time, but in the intervening years the ample exploration of revolu...
The idea of seeking help in her difficulty in religion was as remote from her as seeking help from Alexey Alexandrovitch himself, although she had never had doubts of the faith in which she had been brought up. She knew that the support of religion w...
There's one other thing I'd like to remind you of, my dear. There've been many times when you've sworn to me that after all that life has dealt you, it was no longer possible for you to believe in anything. I replied that both life and my studies had...
We can’t handle absence anymore, anything is better than the blankness; the quiet of nothingness. People fight to put images of love and hate – both equally nauseating – between themselves and the blank space that surrounds us. It’s the only ...
But you're absolutely sure we're right?' The question carried an intensity absent from the previous conversation. 'I remember talking with Henry Kissinger,' she continued, 'and he came up and said 'What's the matter, don't you think we're going to be...
I got an image in my head that never got out. We see a great many things and can remember a great many things, but that is different. We get very few of the true images in our heads of the kind I am talking about, the kind that become more and more v...
Of course not! I knew you would protect me. You swore that you were strong enough to protect Vivienne, didn’t you? How can you promise to protect my sister, but not trust yourself to keep me safe?” The music swelled to a crescendo. Although Adria...
