Rory's big labradoodle made a snap judgement that Frankie was everything her life had been missing up until now. She flung herself into the girl's arms, wiggling and whining, a shaggy mass of chocolate-colored enthusiasm. "Mistral likes you, I see." ...
I did want adventure. I didn’t want to prescribe Ritalin to ADHD kids and tell fat old men to get more exercise. I wanted to go to the heart of Africa. Cradling villages of starving, disease-ridden children. Reserving no luxuries for myself. We wou...
While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening to empire, I And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out, and the mass hardens, I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit, the fruit...
Fan would have expected that one or two of the Girls would have long rebelled at spending a life in a room, would have begged, say, the dentist, to help them steal away, but the funny thing about this existence is that once firmly settled we occupy i...
You know, there's a place we all inhabit, but we don't much think about it, we're scarcely conscious of it, and it lasts for less than a minute a day. It's in the morning, for most of us. It's that time, those few seconds when we're coming out of sle...
There would therefore have been all the more delight at the birth of the first son William within less than a year of Margaret's death, tinged with more than a little anxiety, in view of the fateful words , 'here began plague', in the burial part of ...
We teach our children one thing only, as we were taught: to wake up. We teach our children to look alive there, to join by words and activities the life of human culture on this planet's crust. As adults we are almost all adept at waking up. We have ...
A turning point in the criticism of Hardy’s poetry came in his centenary year, in which W. H. Auden (1940) recorded his indebtedness to Hardy for his own education in matters of poetic technique. .......................... In a radio interview, Lar...
I am a democrat [proponent of democracy] because I believe in the Fall of Man. I think most people are democrats for the opposite reason. A great deal of democratic enthusiasm descends from the ideas of people like Rousseau, who believed in democracy...
Our great mistake in education is, as it seems to me, the worship of book-learning–the confusion of instruction and education. . The children in our elementary schools are wearied by the mechanical act of writing, and the interminable intricacies o...
The Chorus Line: A Rope-Jumping Rhyme we are the maids the ones you killed the ones you failed we danced in air our bare feet twitched it was not fair with every goddess, queen, and bitch from there to here you scratched your itch we did much less th...
But in any case, validity, offender self-reports have dubious validity, especially when the offender's self-interest is at stake. The only rule for deception in sex offenders I have ever found is this: If it is in the offender's best interests to lie...
The possibility of pain is inherent in the very existence of a world where souls can meet. When souls become wicked they will certainly use this possibility to hurt one another; and this, perhaps, accounts for four-fifths of the suffering of men. It ...
Let me implore the reader to try to believe, if only for a moment, that God, who made these deserving people, may really be right when He thinks that their modest prosperity and the happiness of their children are not enough to make them blessed: tha...
A man breaking his journey between one place and another at a third place of no name, character, population or significance, sees a unicorn cross his path and disappear. That in itself is startling, but there are precedents for mystical encounters of...
I wish I could break this window. Step through it. But I can't break this window. I can't even find some less dramatic way to die inside of this school, like hanging myself or slitting my wrists, because what would they do with my body? It might put ...
Consciousness is not about information but about its opposite: order. Consciousness is not a complex phenomenon; it is what consciousness is _about_ that is complex. It is presumably this fact that is the reason many scientists over the decades have ...
I erupt from the dark, crushing tunnel into a flash of light and noise. A new kind of air surrounds me, dry and cold, as they wipe the last smears of home off my skin. I feel a sharp pain as they snip something, and suddenly I am less. I am no one bu...
Those dear to me took fright for my safety and, perhaps, my sanity. Kings, they explained, do not walk like beggars for hundreds of miles. My response was that if a beggar could managed the feat, then why not a king? Did they think me less capable th...
For God's sake, Gwen," he said gently. "What matter that I love you. That's not the bit that's always been missing." Her lips parted. They wished to ask a question she could not bear to bring herself to ask. He was never less than honest. The answer,...
We'd never seen anything as green as these rice paddies. It was not just the paddies themselves: the surrounding vegetation - foliage so dense the trees lost track of whose leaves were whose - was a rainbow coalition of one colour: green. There was a...
