I saw sadness when I looked at what was left of them. The demigods who had once controlled the heavens had been brought low, humbled to the point of death. I always imagined I heart their crumbled masterpieces singing an endless mourning dirge. I tur...
Coincidence sometimes happens as in a fairy tale. Wong was in an emotional state of mind. Still smoking opium, he thought about Kwang’s long-dead father, who had arrived in Singapore from Amoy on the junk Nam Hong. The opium den now felt bare and l...
You came here a fighter, Maddie. Maybe you'd lost a round or two, but you were on your feet. You want to stay in Lucky Harbor? Fight for it. You want a relationship with your sisters? Fight for it." "What about you? What about a relationship with you...
I’m feeling a low regarding writing. I sometimes think I should finish working on my book of stripper poetry that I started, but other times I feel like it’s not worth it. Sometimes I think I should work on my comic book idea, and then other time...
But struggling with these better feelings was pride,--the vice of the lowest and most debased creatures no less than of the high and self-assured. The miserable companion of thieves and ruffians, the fallen outcast of low haunts, the associate of the...
Grief is like sinking, like being buried. I am in water the tawny color of kicked-up dirt. Every breath is full of choking. There is nothing to hold on to, no sides, no way to claw myself up. There is nothing to do but let go. Let go. Feel the weight...
... there are other proud people who have low self-esteem. They feel they haven't lived up to their potential. They feel unworthy. They want to hide and disappear, to fade into the background and nurse their own hurts. We don't associate them with pr...
Doormatitis: door-mat-i-tis noun; low self-worth. A learned behavior where the infected person allows others to walk all over them, blame them, treat them terribly, always giving the boundary crossers the benefit of the doubt. They make excuses for t...
If you care about being thought credible and intelligent, do not use complex language where simpler language will do. My Princeton colleague Danny Oppenheimer refuted a myth prevalent among undergraduates about the vocabulary that professors find mos...
My eyes glue to him in fascination as he cleans his flogger. He’s shirtless since the room is above comfortable temperature. I watch as a drop of sweat creates a path down his back, gliding around all those perfect striated muscles. The drop disapp...
I've no more business to marry Edgar Linton than I have to be in heaven and if the wicked man in there had not brought Heathcliff so low I shouldn't have thought of it. It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now so he shall never know how I love him...
How can you say one thing when your data shows something else. One doesn't know what was on the authors' minds and maybe they interpreted things differently but the sense is that the literature maintains an attitude somewhat like the approach of lawy...
Until we embrace our mutual brokenness, our work with low-income people is likely to do more harm than good. I sometimes unintentionally reduce poor people to objects that I use to fulfill my own need to accomplish something. I am not okay, and you a...
When glance turns To a sky-blue clear day, When the purplr-red sun Sinks low at sirocco, Here nature bestows glory, Joy, sound to eye and heart, And we find in color lore, The universal truth. - - - GER: Wenn der Blick an heitern Tagen Sich zur Himme...
Nice work in there, Herondale, setting the place on fire,” Gabriel observed. “Good thing we were there to clean up after you, or the whole plan would have gone down in flames, along with the shreds of your reputation.” “Are you implying that ...
At first I wasn’t all that tempted by him, but then he killed the spider. Which was a huge point in his favor.” “Absolutely. I love men who kill bugs.” “And then when I was freaking out and couldn’t breathe, he was so…gentle.” Zoe sig...
Indeed, everything that could hum, or buzz, or sing, or bloom had a part in my education--noisy-throated frogs, katydids and crickets held in my hand until, forgetting their embarrassment, they trilled their reedy note, little downy chickens and wild...
There may be hostility and ambivalence, there may even be no responses and those are the worst because it means people do not care. Yet all of these are part of the parcel of land that we call human experience and spirituality. The deep lows and pinn...
Either I protect my friends and lie low until the fight for Radiasure is over, or I put everyone in harm's way and make sure that horrible drug never gets made again. Maybe if I was only putting myself at risk, I could be okay with it. But I can't ma...
What people don't understand about depression is how much it hurts. It's like your brain is convinced that it's dying and produces an acid that eats away at you from the inside, until all that's less is a scary hollowness. Your mind fills with dark t...
Talent is 98% hard work - even Brel said so. The best signal for lack of talent is therefore quite simply low production. That does of course not mean high production guarantees talent, so something does exist that needs to be present - what is that?...
