Reading literature is a way of reaching back to something bigger and older and different. It can give you the feeling that you belong to the past as well as the present, and it can help you realize that your present will someday be someone else’s p...
The slight, the facile and the merely self-glorifying tend to drop away over the centuries, and what we are left with is the bedrock: Homer and Milton, the Greek tragedian and Shakespeare, Chaucer and Cervantes and Swift, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and ...
If your church is not going to support the committed same-sex relationships of LGBT congregants, be honest about that. Bait-and-switch is deceptively un-Christ-like and serves to push gay and transgender believers farther away each time the deception...
There were times . . . when it occurred to me that I was repeating my mother's life. Usually this thought struck me as funny. But if I happened to be tired, or if there were extra bills to pay and no money to pay them with, it seemed awful. I'd think...
It’s just that you go so crazy being alone like that. Sometimes he’d forget my water or food and I’d cry and cry and cry.” She stops talking and looks out the window. “I would try to tell myself stories to pass the time. Fairy tales. Parts ...
Tristan turned to face the Talon crowd and placed one hand on his own chest, “Our parents think that ‘compromise’ is a dirty word, a sign of weakness and neglect. They choose combat over concession every time. They fight for the sake of fightin...
Your soul has a special mission. Your soul is supremely conscious of it. Maya, illusion or forgetfulness, makes you feel that you are finite, weak and helpless. This is not true. You are not the body. You are not the senses. You are not the mind. The...
Like the pain of a bad wound, the effect of a deep shock takes some while to be felt. When a child is told, for the first time in his life, that a person he has known is dead, although he does not disbelieve it, he may well fail to comprehend it and ...
God in His sovereign goodness often uses the painful and at times debilitating injury of a spear thrower to make us readier for His service. ... One thing you discover about spear throwers is that though it’s not necessary for them to be good, it�...
By 1870, Britain’s steam engines generated 4 million horsepower, equivalent to the work of 40 million men, who—if industry had still depended on muscles—would have eaten more than three times Britain’s entire wheat output.
Colm was a good sleeper. But if there was one sound at night that should wake him, and any sensible man who loved his family, it was the barking of dogs. The noise was coming from the village. It was not just one or two dogs, but surely every mangy c...
Wealth isn't always measured in dollar signs. We each have time, talent and creativity, all of which can be powerful forces for positive change. Share your blessings in whatever form they come and to whatever level you have been blessed.
Perhaps there’s no better act of simplification than climbing a mountain. For an afternoon, a day, or a week, it’s a way of reducing a complicated life into a simple goal. All you have to do is take one step at a time, place one foot in front of ...
i do not say 'good-bye.' i believe that's one of the bullshittiest words ever invented. it's not like you're given the choice to say 'bad-bye' or 'awful-bye' or 'couldn't-care-less-about-you-bye.' every time you leave, it's supposed to be a good one....
Do you want to be with Dave for the rest of your life?” Then he rips off a piece of paper and picks up the smallest charcoal stick from my set. He writes something. He passes it over to me. It says: Time will tell. “And while you’re waiting,”...
Nice work," I commented drily. "How old was that littlest one? Five? Did she put up a terrible fight?" "I feared for my life," Zach said with a perfectly straight face. "You must be bored, Julia. You usually have a sharper sense of humor than that." ...
We did sometimes play jokes on each other. It was fun, until about a month ago when he attacked me with nerf guns when I walked in the door. I slipped while running away and fell on the coffee table. Let’s just say I wouldn’t be winning the most ...
I explained to him - as I withdrew the cup, ripped open the sachet and dunked the tea bag - that tea was an infusion, which meant that it was vital for the water to be actually boiling when it came into contact with the leaves. He looked at me furiou...
Innumerable conditions must be exquisitely optimized for the support of humanity and of civilization. Many of them are highly time variable. Evidence showing that a wide variety of independent conditions all reached optimality during the identical na...
Killing Japanese didn’t bother me at that time. It was getting the war over with that bothered me. So I wasn’t worried particularly about how many people we killed in getting the job done… . All war is immoral, and if you let it bother you, you...
The last time somebody pointed out that cowboys ride horses, not tricycles, I shot him. Of course, I waited until another gunslinger gunned him down, but nevertheless, I still shot him.
