Our destinies are riddled with challenges that have a tendency to ruin well laid plans. Many have attempted to take fate into their own hands and have been unsuccessful in changing it. Others find that their paths differ from what they have dreamed f...
No tabloid will ever print the startling news that the mummified body of Jesus of Nazareth has been discovered in old Jerusalem. Christians have no carefully embalmed body enclosed in a glass case to worship. Thank God, we have an empty tomb. The glo...
Life is a precious commodity, Charles. It’s time you achieved your full potential and learned the true value of things.” “You’re talking like a Stalinist!” I cried. “People don’t get jobs to achieve things and learn values! They do it b...
No, my dog used to gaze at me, paying me the attention I need, the attention required to make a vain person like me understand that, being a dog, he was wasting time, but, with those eyes so much purer than mine, he’d keep on gazing at me with a lo...
Tolkien, who created this marvellous vehicle, doesn't go anywhere in it. He just sits where he is. What I mean by that is that he always seems to be looking backwards, to a greater and more golden past; and what's more he doesn't allow girls or women...
I value ethical standards, of course. But in a culture like ours – which devalues or dismisses the reality and power of the inner life – ethics too often becomes an external code of conduct, an objective set of rules we are told to follow, a mora...
I am strongly of the opinion that, after the age of twenty-one, a man ought not to be out of bed and awake at four in the morning. The hour breeds thought. At twenty-one, life being all future, it may be examined with impunity. But, at thirty, having...
If prayer stands as the place where God and human beings meet, then I must learn about prayer. Most of my struggles in the Christian life circle around the same two themes: why God doesn't act the way we want God to, and why I don't act the way God w...
We were born helpless to learn unconditional love and to care for each other, We become children to learn to wonder and care only for the present moment, We become teenagers to experience life passionately and fearlessly, We become adults learn respo...
I can relate to Marguerite Duras even though I'm not French, nor have I been consumed by love for an East Asian man. I can life inside Alice Munro's skin. But I can't relate to my own mother. My body is full of sentences and moments, my heart resplen...
I don't teach writing. I teach patience. Toughness. Stubbornness. The willingness to fail. I teach the life. The odd thing is most of the things that stop an inexperienced writer are so far from the truth as to be nearly beside the point. When you fe...
I mean to say, we all sprang from humble origins. Goodness gracious, who would have thought that a species of monkey would take over the kingdom of the world. … I cannot help but feel that the monkey was not a good choice. Surely one of the cat fam...
I tell students, when in doubt, to title their story after the smallest concrete object in their story. I warn them off plays on words, ('The Rent Also Rises'--no; 'Life in My Cat House'-- ) and no grand reaches, either. 'Reverence,' 'Respect,' 'Regr...
If I do depart this world out here, let it be known that I went out grinning will you, and loving it. LOVING IT. Steve, are you listening ? I FEEL GREAT. Life’s so joyous, so sad, so ephemeral, so crazy, so meaningless, so goddamn funny. This is pa...
a delegate shout out from the floor: “Peonage, Anti-Lynch Bill, poll tax, these are our issues. They are the most controversial issues in American life, and some of us will have to die for them! Yes, we want to join with the CIO! We cannot stop for...
I am at a loss to understand why people hold Miss Austen's novels at so high a rate, which seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in their wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the...
If you love something, you find a way to have it in your life. Opposers may take away your means and tools, but you simply turn to crude replacements, fashioning them from scraps if necessary. Threats only make you steal moments of secrecy to satisfy...
I believe life is an education meant to teach us the need to be better people. And I believe this learning often takes place through trial and error which may mean being an awful person at times before clearly seeing and grasping the necessity to i...
On one hand, you wish for no pain or suffering or misery on anyone. Yet you hope to see your children grow into individuals of compassionate and kind character. And it seems that pain, suffering, and misery adequately humble an individual, cultivatin...
For the first time since she'd pieced her heart back together, she felt a small tug at one of the strings. She dropped her hands to her sides and took a step back. The one word she'd waited to hear could destroy her carefully constructed life. "Don't...
One can't prescribe books, even the best books, to people unless one knows a good deal about each individual person. If a man is keen on reading, I think he ought to open his mind to some older man who knows him and his life, and to take his advice i...
