The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It is not a creed. Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to b...
A broken heart is something even I can’t protect you from. I’ve been alone for so long, and believe me, all that does is provide a false sense of security. Being alone doesn’t erase the deep yearning that exists in all of us. We are not solitar...
[Y]our agricultural revolution is not an event like the Trojan War, isolated in the distant past and without relevance to your lives today. The work begun by those neolithic farmers in the Near East has been carried forward from one generation to the...
I believe now that we’re the enemy to the things we really want for our lives. We get really good at telling ourselves ugly lies on repeat every day. You’re unworthy. You’re ugly. You’re inadequate.
Calling it a simple schoolgirl crush was like saying a Rolls-Royce was a vehicle with four wheels, something like a hay-wagon. She did not giggle wildly and blush when she saw him, nor did she chalk his name on trees or write it on the walls of the K...
Whenever people talk in the abstract about the pros and cons of immigration, one should not forget that immigrants are individual human beings whose lives happen not to fit neatly within national borders – and that like all human beings, they are a...
What matters is that Southern slaves, at least on the larger plantations, created their own African American culture, which helped to preserve some of the more crucial areas of life and thought from white control or domination without significantly r...
We often forget our human connectedness. Throughout my life, I have felt the greatest beauty lies in this connection. It has been in the deepest connections with others that I have experienced the greatest degree of learning, healing and transformati...
Happy man, who is dead to the world, and alive to God! separated from the world, and collected into Christ! Blessed is the man into whose heart such Divine graces are infused, as withdraw it wholly from every tendency to inferior things, and exalt it...
Even if I could live forever,” she said to the baby, “I still don’t know which way I would teach you. I was once so free and innocent. I too laughed for no reason." “But later I threw away my foolish innocence to protect myself. And then I ta...
If the spirit of their intercourse were still the same after their coming together as it had been when they were living apart,' Aristotle writes, their association can't really be considered a polis, or political community. 'A polis is not an associa...
Relinquish! What! my vocation? My great work? My foundation laid on earth for a mansion in heaven? My hopes of being numbered in the band who have merged all ambitions in the glorious one of bettering their race - of carrying knowledge into the realm...
The press has the power to stimulate people to clean up the environment prevent nuclear proliferation force crooked politicians out of office reduce poverty provide quality health care for all people and even to save the lives of millions of people a...
These are the few ways we can practice humility: To speak as little as possible of one's self. To mind one's own business. Not to want to manage other people's affairs. To avoid curiosity. To accept contradictions and correction cheerfully. To pass o...
Without the Project I was nothing but a secretary on a road to nowhere, drifting toward frosted hair and menthol addiction.
We are here because over billions of years, countless variables fell into place, any of which could have taken another path. We are essentially a beautiful fluke, as are the millions of other species with which we share this planet. Our cells are com...
Sometimes, if you want to be happy, you've got to run away to Bath and marry a punk rocker.
Which just goes to show, I guess, that dinner parties are like everything else - not as fragile as we think they are.
The porter spends his days in the Library keeping strict vigil over this catacomb of books, passing along between the shelves and yet never paying heed to the almost audible susurrus of desire- the desire every book has to be taken down and read, to ...
Youth is an intoxication without wine, someone says. Life is an intoxication. The only sober man is the melancholiac, who, disenchanted, looks at life, sees it as it really is, and cuts his throat. If this be so, I want to be very drunk. The great th...
I have been thinking ... that the social moulds civilization fits us into have no more relation to our actual shapes than the conventional shapes of the constellations have to the real star-patterns. I am called Mrs. Richard Phillotson, living a calm...
