My mother died of colon cancer one week after my eleventh birthday, and that fact has shaped my life. All that I have become and much that I have not become, I trace directly or indirectly to her death. ... In my professional and personal life, I hav...
...whether God come to his children with a rod or a crown, if he come himself with it, it is well. Welcome, welcome Jesus, what way soever thou come, if we can get a sight of thee. And sure I am, it is better to be sick, providing Christ come to the ...
Wild creatures' eyes, the colonel said, Are innocent and fathomless And when I look at them I see That they are not aware of me And oh I find and oh I bless A comfort in this emptiness They only see me when they want To pounce upon me at the hunt; Bu...
You spill a lot of beans in historical fiction. Crime fiction is about spilling no beans at all. You spill the least beans you possibly can. So because I had already written historical fiction before I was really good at the spilling beans section, b...
Raise from your bed of languor Raise from your bed of dismay Your friends will not come tomorrow As they did not come today You must rely on yourself, they said, You must rely on yourself, Oh but I find this pill so bitter said the poor man As he too...
This is the spot where I will lie When life has had enough of me, These are the grasses that will blow Above me like a living sea. These gay old lilies will not shrink To draw their life from death of mine, And I will give my body's fire To make blue...
From my spirit's gray defeat, From my pulse's flagging beat, From my hopes that turned to sand Sifting through my close-clenched hand, From my own fault's slavery, If I can sing, I still am free. For with my singing I can make A refuge for my spirit'...
People can go on telling themselves things like “Think before you speak!” or “You don’t believe that yourself” or “Forget it!” But they can also say, “Oh, what lovely flowers!” or “Are you a phone freak or something?” or “Suit...
Ichigo: You got that? Huh?! I'm the rescuer, so you just SHUT UP!! Rukia: Wha--wha'd you say? A rescuer isn't supposed to ignore the rescuee! Ichigo: Yeah? And what kind of rescuee complains about the rescue!? Why don't you go sit in a corner and tre...
The ‘experimental’ writer, then, is simply following the story’s commands to the best of his human ability. The writer is not the story, the story is the story. See? Sometimes this is very hard to accept and sometimes too easy. On the one hand,...
We are forever lured by the sirens of the dogmatic mind, with its haughty complacency, which determines that one´s relationship to others is only meaningful when one tries to convince them of one´s single truth. In such a spiritual and intellectual...
Just as man's pride wishes to insert human actions and merits into the gospel, so that we can boast, at least a bit, in our own accomplishments (thus denying the sufficiency of God's grace), so too man seeks to enthrone his own thoughts and authority...
Yet the experience of reading a novel has certain qualities that remind us of the traditional apprehension of mythology. It can be seen as a form of meditation. Readers have to live with a novel for days or even weeks. It projects them into another w...
Theology is not a private subject for theologians only. Nor is it a private subject for professors. Fortunately, there have always been pastors who have understood more about theology than most professors. Nor is theology a private subject of study f...
The night stayed outside. She was surprised. She opened her mouth but no sound came out. Instead, blue things flew in, pieces of glass or tin, or necklaces of blue diamond, perhaps. The air was the blue of a pool when there are shadows, when clouds c...
There are moments in my life when I feel like I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be, doing exactly what I’m supposed to do. I pay attention to them. They’re my cosmic landmarks, letting me know I’m on the right path. Now that I’m older and...
In the distant past, Muslim doctors advised nervous people to look up at the sky. Forget the tight earth. Imagine that the sky, all of it, belonged to them alone. Crescent, low moon, more stars than the eyes looking up at them. But the sky was free, ...
won't you celebrate with me what i have shaped into a kind of life? i had no model. born in babylon both nonwhite and woman what did i see to be except myself? i made it up here on this bridge between starshine and clay, my one hand holding tight my ...
Had you been lying all along? Mum gently stroked my hair. I whispered into her shoulder. “I can’t go back. Not yet. I can’t leave.” And she held my head tight to her chest and wrapped her arms around me. “You don’t have to,” she said, r...
We all have an ongoing narrative inside our heads, the narrative that is spoken aloud if a friend asks a question. That narrative feels deeply natural to me. We also hang on to scraps of dialogue. Our memories don’t usually serve us up whole scenes...
He was becoming something the world had never seen before - a dream animal - living at least partially within a secret universe of his own creation and sharing that secret universe in his head with other, similar heads. Symbolic communication had beg...
