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...
As a kid, I was taught that if you opened the Bible in the middle you'd probably land on the book of Psalms. And near the middle is everyone's favorite, the 23rd, there is this line: "You prepare a table before in the presence of my enemies." I don't...
Throughout my life, until this very moment, whatever virtue I have accomplished, including any benefit that may come from this book, I dedicate to the welfare of all beings. May the roots of suffering diminish. May warfare, violence, neglect, indiffe...
Just as sometimes I wondered if Grandpa had ever existed, sometimes I wondered if I truly existed myself. As I was running, I could see myself from outside myself: a skinny girl with the flapping shorts and too- big a T-shirt, always watching the oth...
Breyona didn’t have to force a laugh. “Fellowship? Who do you think you are? Freedo the hobbit?” “It’s Frodo,” he said over his shoulder. “And if I was a character from L.O.T.R., I’d obviously by Strider.” Shaking his head, he conti...
These were the kids who would take LSD for recreational purposes, who relied upon tape recorders to supply the weird studio effects their music required and who could repeat the cosmic wisdom of the Space Brothers as if it were the Pledge of Allegian...
As I have explained in earlier chapters, abusiveness has little to do with psychological problems and everything to do with values and beliefs. Where do a boy’s values about partner relationships come from? The sources are many. The most important ...
The baby explodes into an unknown world that is only knowable through some kind of a story - of course that is how we all live, it's the narrative of our lives, but adoption drops you into the story after it has started. It's like reading a book with...
J. E. Littlewood, a mathematician at Cambridge University, wrote about the law of truly large numbers in his 1986 book, "Littlewood's Miscellany." He said the average person is alert for about eight hours every day, and something happens to the avera...
She would not say of any one in the world that they were this or were that. She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on. She had a perpetual sense, as sh...
The one I felt and still feel most is lack of time. I used to have time to think, to reflect, my mind and I. We would sit together of an evening and listen to the inner melodies of the spirit, which one hears only in leisure moments when the words of...
Reading. The erotics of reading for me -- its moment of trembling pleasure -- lie in those times when I realise that what I am reading is just what I was about to say. It is a moment of jealousy and disappointment, as if the occasion had been stolen ...
She asked another question: "What does it matter if the rhinos die out? Is it really important that they are saved?" This would normally have riled me... but I had comes to think of her as Dr. Spock form Star Trek - an emotionless, purely logical cre...
Ri, here's a question for you,” Stella started. She opened it up to everyone else, as well. “When do your kids stop being pets and start being people?” The room went silent, except for Gloria trying to stifle her giggles. Stella looked around a...
That time I thought I could not go any closer to grief without dying I went closer, and I did not die. Surely God had his hand in this, as well as friends. Still, I was bent, and my laughter, as the poet said, was nowhere to be found. Then said my fr...
Sometimes when I'm having a boring interview on the telephone, and I'm trying to think about something else because the questions are too boring, and I start looking around the room where I work, you know, full of books piled up to the sky, all diffe...
There's a thing that happens in Hollywood, when you hand in a script with magic in it, and the people at the studio who read it say "We don't quite understand... can you explain the rules? What are the rules here? The magic must have rules" and somet...
It seems to me that if you place music (and books, probably, and films, and plays, and anything that makes you feel) at the center of your being, then you can’t afford to sort out your love life, start to think of it as the finished product. You’...
I’ve grown quite weary of the spunky heroines, brave rape victims, soul-searching fashionistas that stock so many books. I particularly mourn the lack of female villains — good, potent female villains. Not ill-tempered women who scheme about land...
I was Juliet and Quinn was Romeo, and the lines weren't dead black-and-white words on a page but somehow alive, as natural and real as the argument we'd had about the spider and the fly. The rows of empty seats were gone, and we were in a candlelit b...
They didn't exchange a single word. But in the weeks that followed, Trip spent his days wandering the halls, hoping for Lux to appear, the most naked person with clothes on he had ever seen. Even in sensible school shoes, she shuffled as though baref...
