When I thought about why I was sometimes reluctant to push myself, I realized that it was because I was afraid of failure - but in order to have more success, I needed to be willing to accept more failure.
I enjoy the fun of failure. It's fun to fail, I kept repeating. It's part of being ambitious; it's part of being creative. If something is worth doing, it's worth doing badly
... one flaw throws the loveliness of [everything else] into focus. I remember reading that Shakers deliberately introduced a mistake into the things they made, to show that man shouldn't aspire to the perfection of God. Flawed can be more perfect th...
What a strange revelation of self-esteem it is when people only love those who think and feel as they do - an extension of themselves, in fact! Even Christianity does not cure us, since one cannot feel right without assuming that the rest must be wro...
They say being in love and loving someone are two different things, right? I mean, you love your best friend, but you love your husband, right? Falling in love with someone is easy. It's loving when the newness has worn off, when life gets tough, whe...
Critical thinking does seem a superior sort of thinking because it seems as though the critic is actually going beyond the scope of what is being criticized in order to criticize it. That is only rarely a true assumption because, most often, the crit...
Kids don’t act right. Sure it’s embarrassing when it happens but any reasonable person won’t fault a parent when a kid throws a fit. However, when a child doesn’t act right and a parent doesn’t act at all then we’ve got a problem. Parents...
The mistake you make, don't you see,is in thinking one can live in a corrupt society without being corrupt oneself. After all, what do you achieve by refusing to make money? You're trying to behave as though one could stand right outside our economic...
Underground, in the dark wet hole that was home to the spiders and the rats, something moved. It had no right to be down there but it belonged nowhere else. Half drowned half alive it pushed the water ahead of it into the culverts and drains as it pa...
Out in Saxe-Coburg Street she stood still for a moment and looked at the gardens. He kissed me, she thought. He made the move; I didn't. The thought was an overwhelming one and invested the everyday world about her, the world of the square, of trees,...
You don't have to treat me as if I'm made out of glass and might break," she said. "I'm a lot stronger than I look." "Is that right?" He looped an arm around her waist and pulled her to him right there in the street between their vehicles. Her full l...
All I want is someone decent.” She sniffled again, her eyes filling with tears. “You know? Kind. Good. Like in all those love stories I’m such an expert on. It can’t just be fiction. It can’t. Those guys are out there, I know it. I just can...
All right, shadow-priest, you've been spying — on what? What state secrets have you learned watching me groom these horses?' 'Only that they hate you, Daru. Every time your back was turned, they got ready to nip you — only you always seemed to st...
Have you ever heard somebody sing some lyrics that you've never sung before, and you realize you've never sung the right words in that song? You hear them and all of a sudden you say to yourself, 'Life in the Fast Lane?' That's what they're saying ri...
Dignity is not a symbol bestowed on man, nor does the word itself possess force. Man's dignity is a force and the only modus vivendi by which man and his history survive. When mid-twentieth century Germany did not let man live and die with this right...
If a man were to look over the fence on one side of his garden and observe that the neighbor on his left had laid his garden path round a central lawn; and were to look over the fence on the other side of his garden and observe that the neighbor on h...
I receive grace. And through me, grace could flow on. Like a cycle of water in continuous movement, grace is meant to fall, a rain...again, again, again. I could share the grace, multiply the joy, extend the table of the feast, enlarge the paradise o...
Being in a hurry. Getting to the next thing without fully entering the thing in front of me. I cannot think of a single advantage I've ever gained from being in a hurry. But a thousand broken and missed things, tens of thousands, lie in the wake of a...
When we lay the soil of our hard lives opened the rain of grace and let Joy permeate our cracked and dry places, let joy soak into our broken skin and deep crevices, life grows. How can this not be the best thing for the world? for us? The clouds ope...
Time, what God first deemed holy above all else (Genesis 2:3). Thank God for the time, and very God enters that time, presence hallowing it.... I awake to I AM here. When I'm present, I meet I AM, the very presence of a present God. (page 70)
I speak it to God: I don't really want 'more' time; I just want 'enough' time. Time to breathe deep and time to see real and time to laugh long, time to give You glory and rest deep and sing joy and just enough time in a day not to feel hounded, pres...
