It is a mistake for anyone who is just in this stage to appear before a church as a teacher. He has outgrown the naivete with which in young people’s work he might by all means have taken this part. He has not yet come to that maturity which would ...
He dragged me up. "You're bruised all to hell, your hand is broken, and can you even imagine how much more pain waits for you tonight?" he asked. "Why won't you just learn? Why must you make me keep hurting you?" "I'm not making you do anything, Gisb...
Food is something I am going to have to face at least three times a day for the rest of my life. And I am not perfect. But one really bad day does not mean that I am hopeless and back at square one with my eating disorder. Olympic ice skaters fall in...
Each big idea like that is an operating system upgrade," she says, smiling. Comfortable territory. "Writers are responsible for some of it. They say Shakespeare invented the internal monologue." Oh, I am very familiar with the internal monologue. "Bu...
The scientist in me worries that my happiness is nothing more than a symptom of bipolar disease, hypergraphia from a postpartum disorder. The rest of me thinks that artificially splitting off the scientist in me from the writer in me is actually a ki...
I am a bomb but I mean you no harm. That I still am here to tell this, is a miracle: I was deployed on May 15, 1957, but I didn’t go off because a British nuclear engineer, a young father, developed qualms after seeing pictures of native children m...
Carmack was of the moment. His ruling force was focus. Time existed for him not in some promising future or sentimental past but in the present condition, the intricate web ol problems and solutions, imagination and code. He kept nothing from the pas...
You make someone into a object of – not so much of pity as of weakness, sickness, stupidity, inefectiveness, do you see what I mean? You hit them for their stupidity and their inability to respond, and when you’ve hurt them, marked them, they’r...
Just this past summer, I took online courses in introductory logic and law through civilization. Often the weight of history, with its facts heaped upon facts requiring complex chains of inference to sort through – I mean complex for someone with t...
Now here it was after all, preserved by some considerate hand with varnisch and wax. Preserved along with it, like stale air in an unopened room, was the well known fear which had surrounded and filled those days, so much of it that I hadn't even kno...
If instead of arranging the atoms in some definite pattern, again and again repeated, on and on, or even forming little lumps of complexity like the odor of violets, we make an arrangement which is always different from place to place, with different...
And if Francoise then, inspired like a poet with a flood of confused reflections upon bereavement, grief, and family memories, were to plead her inability to rebut my theories, saying: "I don't know how to espress (sic) myself" - I would triumph over...
Unless followed by the world 'education', has now lost this meaning [seeking knowledge or doing something for its own sake -- i.e. 'freely' with no exterior motive]. For that loss, so damanging to the whole of our cultural outlook, we must thank thos...
But no, music lasted longer than anything it inspired. After LPs, cassettes, and CDs, when matrimony was about to decay into its component elements—alimony and acrimony—the songs startled him and regained all their previous, pre-Rachel meanings, ...
Bianca, camp is cool! It's got a pegasus stable and a sword-fighting arena and… I mean, what do you get by joining the Hunters?" To begin with," Zoe said, "immortality." I stared at her, then at Artemis. "She's kidding, right?" Zoe rarely kids abou...
All of the myths of mankind are nothing but show business,' the other man said to me during our initial meeting. 'Everything that we supposedly live by and supposedly die by — whether it's religious scriptures or makeshift slogans — all of it is ...
You know, there was a time when childbirth was possibly the most terrifying thing you could do in your life, and you were literally looking death in the face when you went ahead with it. And so this is a kind of flashback to a time when that's what e...
How can a three-pound mass of jelly that you can hold in your palm imagine angels, contemplate the meaning of infinity, and even question its own place in the cosmos? Especially awe inspiring is the fact that any single brain, including yours, is mad...
We tell each other everything. You take the rap for bad things I do, we have this amazing time together and then all day in classes you ignore me like I don't exist. And I have to watch you and Sally together, and you licking her arse and not telling...
Today, what's normal is being redefined: from vaginal birth to surgical birth; from 'My water broke,' to 'Let's break your water;' from 'It's time' to 'It's time for the induction.' As medical anthropologist Robbie Davis-Floyd writes, 'in the early t...
When I throw back my head and howl People (women mostly) say But you've always done what you want, You always get your way - A perfectly vile and foul Inversion of all that's been. What the old ratbags mean Is I've never done what I don't. So the shi...
