But in reading all of the passages in which Jesus uses the word "hell," what is so striking is that people believing the right or wrong things isn't his point. He's often not talking about "beliefs" as we think of them--he's talking about anger and l...
It was ironic, really - you want to die because you can't be bothered to go on living - but then you're expected to get all energetic and move furniture and stand on chairs and hoist ropes and do complicated knots and attach things to other things an...
The past doesn't exist. There is nothing to be sorry for. Today is when we start to live. Look... look at the sea. The sea has no past. It is just there. It will never ask us to explain. The stars, the moon are there to light our way, to shine for us...
There are days when that dark face is something I can think of as a friend – a primal energy that carries me forward when nothing else will – but more often than not I am face-to-face with a stranger, a companion to something I recognise as mysel...
The Boy’s head was spinning. Raul was real, and quite possibly not kindly disposed to him, as Marama’s potential heir and jail-breaker. The sailors worshiped Marama, who controlled the tides and commanded them through dreams? The Geolwe collected...
So you think that most people bet everything, their whole lives, on hope. Just hoping that what they're feeling is real.' 'Real isn't relevant,' Georgie said, turning completely to face Heather. 'It's like . . . you're tossing a ball between you, and...
If you think that it would be impossible to improve upon the Ten Commandments as a statement of morality, you really owe it to yourself to read some other scriptures. Once again, we need look no further than the Jains: , the Jain patriarch, surpassed...
Dating is probably the most fraught human interaction there is. You're sizing people up to see if they're worth your time and attention, and they're doing the same to you. It's meritocracy applied to personal life, but there's no accountability. We s...
Those were the best days in the life of Tancredi and Angelica, lives later to be so variegated, so erring, against the inevitable background of sorrow. But that they did not know then; and they were pursuing a future which they deemed more concrete t...
On the revelation that there are no gods or afterlife:- "I do not 'like' the truth any more than you Avil, or anyone. I wrestled with it for a long time, for a while I was distraught, desperate to find that my research had been wrong - the more I sea...
The future that we want - this is it. This is the future of all the previous thoughts you've ever had about the future. You're in it. You're already in it. What is the purpose of all this living if it's only to get some place else and then when you'r...
The forests were crippled, the wheat fields vanished; in place of the grass there reappeared stone and drifting sand. Men perished and moved on, the cities sank back into the sand, the dust settled over them. Thousands of years later Nordic dreamers ...
The hell of it is, I know the answer. The answer is that you never, ever, rely on another person for your peace of mind. If you do, you're screwed but good. Not right away, maybe, but sooner or later. You have to -- I don't know --you have to learn t...
When Doris had died so long ago, it was weeks before Mary could think clearly and remember what she was supposed to do the next minute and then the minute after that. Even though Doris had shown Mary how to get rid of the chiggers that burrowed under...
I want to do what little I can to make my country truly free, to broaden the intellectual horizon of our people, to destroy the prejudices born of ignorance and fear, to do away with the blind worship of the ignoble past, with the idea that all the g...
Besides all of this, Patrick and I living together for the first time meant it was the beginning of a life together, that nitty-gritty one where we fight over the way he leaves the spatula on a still-hot burner, or how she always “organizes” his ...
We have all lived through that shriveling moment when a parent walks into a room and repeats, with sardonic disbelief, a couplet picked up from the stereo or the TV. 'What does that mean, then?' my mother asked me during Top of the Pops. "Get it on /...
If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty of lives and whole towns destroyed or about to be. We are not wise, and not very often kind. And much can never be redeemed. Still life has some possibility ...
Women are caught between feminism and the pornification of America, and men are, too. I spent my youth squatting on a pedestal, the beauty queen who couldn’t get laid. I’ve been a Relationship Consultant, phone sex diva, mistress, been fought ove...
The exhausted earth groaned and quivered under the monotonous glare of the sun. Spirals of heat rose from the ground as if from molten lava. A panting lizard crawled painfully over the fevered rock in search of a shady crevice. Cattle and dogs cringe...
No group-living nonhuman primate is monogamous, and adultery has been documented in every human culture studied- including those in which fornicators are routinely stoned to death. In light of all of this bloody retribution, it's hard to see how mono...
