We feel unfulfilled when there is a gap between what is most important to us, the realm of personal leadership, and what we are actually doing with our time, the realm of personal management. You are satisfied with your day when there is a match betw...
A library is a good place to go when you feel unhappy, for there, in a book, you may find encouragement and comfort. A library is a good place to go when you feel bewildered or undecided, for there, in a book, you may have your question answered. Boo...
What everyone agreed was very nice, was the way Clémence had carried on. Obviously, she wasn't the kind of girl you'd ask again: she'd ended up showing off everything she'd got, and she'd puked all down one of the muslin curtains and completely ruin...
All I really, really want to do is find a very, very fine chocolate store that I can walk into and then figure out how in the world one manages to pick out just a few chocolates out of all those very many chocolates! If I am one day able to walk into...
Stories serve multiple purposes. At a basic level they are great entertainment, which is essential for living a happy and healthy life, but on a deeper level stories help us explore issues that are otherwise difficult to address. On one hand a good b...
Like vampires and extremely rich people, black folk can sense one another. Use your Spidey Sense (Blacky Sense?). Use your blackdar to inspect the workplace for signs of Other Negroes. They may be working security for the building. They may be in adm...
Governments are deemed to succeed or fail by how well they make money go round, regardless of whether it serves any useful purpose. They regard it as a sacred duty to encourage the country’s most revolting spectacle: the annual feeding frenzy in wh...
Fast Eddie: What if I don't pay ya, Bert? Bert Gordon: [laughs] You don't pay me? You're gonna get your thumbs broken again. And your fingers. If I want 'em to, they're gonna break your right arm in three or four places. Minnesota Fats: You better pa...
Anne Kronenberg: My girlfriend says you guys don't like women, I'm just asking: Is there a place for us in all this, or are you guys all scared of girls? Harvey Milk: Okay, gentlemen: We've already got a tinkerbell, a lotus blossom, we've got Jim and...
Red: [narrating] And that's how it came to pass that on the second-to-last day of the job, the convict crew that tarred the plate factory roof in the spring of forty-nine wound up sitting in a row at ten o'clock in the morning drinking icy cold, Bohe...
I would never normally approach a woman in this way, but I couldn't help but notice that you have the eyes of a lady I was once desperately in love with. " "What a shame to love only once," she said, showing her white teeth in a wicked smile. "I've h...
Fletcher, I've been around for a long time. I've been in love too many times to count. I'd like to say it gets easier, but it doesn't. The pain you're feeling now is the pain you're going to feel again and again. The advantage of having lived through...
Everyone tends to think of October as being an autumn month. Not so much in south Alabama, usually. There, it's another warm, if not hot, summer month. But the Alabama summer heat will sometimes get broken by cooler days. The haze of the depth of sum...
In a variation on James's recipe for interesting experience--the familiar leavened by the novel--Hobbs's "art of choosing difficulties" requires selecting projects that are "just manageable." If an activity is too easy, you lose focus and get bored. ...
Whether we accept it or not, this will likely be the century that determines what the optimal human population is for our planet. It will come about in one of two ways: Either we decide to manage our own numbers, to avoid a collision of every line on...
If I kissed her now, one of two things would happen. We’d either get naked right here on the beach and probably get arrested, or I’d somehow manage to get us up the hill to my house, and then we’d get naked. But kissing her once, then letting h...
Human vocabulary is still not capable, and probably never will be, of knowing, recognizing, and communicating everything that can be humanly experienced and felt. Some say that the main cause of this very serious difficulty lies in the fact that huma...
Minimizing the importance of transformed feelings makes Christian conversion less supernatural and less radical. It is humanly manageable to make decisions of the will for Christ. No supernatural power is required to pray prayers, sign cards, walk ai...
So, regarding that tidbit about your having a fertile imagination when it comes to private activities," she said, fighting off anxiety. "Was it another lie?" "Depends on how you look at it. It's not exactly a lie, and if you come with me to the Weird...
Shall I pour for you madam?” he asks. It is an appropriate question and yet he makes it sound like a scorching proposal… “Mmmm, please,” is all I manage in reply. I watch him filling the crystal flutes one at a time. He is meticulous and seem...
I applied for an overnight stocking position at a supermarket, but I didn’t get the job. It probably went to somebody the manager knew. What, did I have to go to Harvard to get the kind of connections necessary to get an $8.00/hr job?
