In the end it comes down to two rival versions of the English middle afternoon. Post-Barrett, Pink Floyd kept on in a middle-afternoonish vein, but they fell in love with the idea of portentous storm clouds in the offing somewhere over Grantchester.....
Symptoms of illness and distress, plus your feelings about them, can be viewed as messengers coming to tell you something important about your body or about your mind. In the old days, if a king didn't like the message he was given, he would sometime...
Lt. Col. Frank Slade: Your father pedals car telephones at a 300 percent markup. Your mother works on heavy commission at a camera store. Graduated to it from espresso machines. Hah! [pause] Lt. Col. Frank Slade: What are you, dying of some wasting d...
[last lines] Dr. Floyd: [prerecorded message speaking through TV on board Discovery while Bowman looks on] Good day, gentlemen. This is a prerecorded briefing made prior to your departure and which for security reasons of the highest importance has b...
World Security Council: This is out of line, Director. You're dealing with forces you can't control. Nick Fury: You ever been in a war, Councilman? In a firefight? Did you feel an over-abundance of control? World Security Council: You're saying that ...
Poor Cook, thought Captain, I must be kinder to her. She makes a splendid pet. How faithful she is! I always say you can't get the same love from a dog that you can from a human. So clever, too. I believe she understands every word I say. I believe t...
SIR DANIEL was a large man, broad of shoulder...his eyes were rather small above the double pouches and the look they fixed on Dalgliesh gave nothing away. Looking at his bland, unrevealing face sparked off for Dalgliesh a childhood memory. A multi-m...
Inside Critics The critical voices in our own heads are far more vicious than what we might hear from the outside. Our "inside critics" have intimate knowledge of us and can zero in on our weakest spots. You might be told by the critics that you're t...
I read a page of Plato's great work. I can no longer understand anything, because behind the words on the page, which have their own heavenly brightness, to be sure, there shines an even brighter, an enormous, dazzling -why- that blots out everything...
To stop the drug traffic is not the best way to prevent people from using drugs. The best way is to practice the Fifth Precept and to help others practice. Consuming mindfully is the intelligent way to stop ingesting toxins into our consciousness and...
I thought that to get to know a desert it was enough to have been there. I thought that to have seen the dogs dying along the Cholula road, or to have seen the eyes of the lepers at Chiengmai gave me the right to talk about it. To have seen! To have ...
For us to deem a work of architecture elegant, it is hence not enough that it look simple: we must feel that the simplicity it displays has been hard won, that it flows from the resolution of demanding technical or natural predicament. Thus we call t...
This was the geography around which my reality revolved: it did not occur to me, ever, that people were good or that a man was capable of change or that the world could be a better place through one’s taking pleasure in a feeling or a look or a ges...
A man protects his fish from rats by keeping it under a cat's watch. How wise! Another buys a gun for security reasons, but decides to kill a ghost with it. How smart! One prays to God for safety, as he climbs a palm tree with sewing thread. How inte...
How surely gravity's law, strong as an ocean current, takes hold of the smallest thing and pulls it toward the heart of the world. Each thing--- each stone, blossom, child--- is held in place. Only we, in our arrogance, push out beyond what we each b...
There can be, if I forebode aright, no power, short of the Divine mercy, to disclose, whether by uttered words, or by type or emblem, the secrets that may be buried with a human heart. The heart, making itself guilty of such secrets, must perforce ho...
So nobody must be allowed to think at all. Down with the public schools! Children must be drilled mentally by quarter-educated herdsmen, whose wages would stop at the first sign of disagreement with the bosses. For the rest, deafen the whole world wi...
But supposing God became a man - suppose our human nature which can suffer and die was amalgamated with God's nature in one person - then that person could help us. He could surrender His will, and suffer and die, because He was man; and He could do ...
He had also been demonstrative and intelligent from the very beginning, his questions startlingly insightful. She would watch him absorb a new idea and wonder what effect it would have on him, because, with Edgar, EVERYTHING came out, eventually, som...
My hope is that we can navigate through this world and our lives with the grace and integrity of those who need our protection. May we have the sense of humor and liveliness of the goats; may we have the maternal instincts and protective nature of th...
The central attitudes driving Mr. Right are: You should be in awe of my intelligence and should look up to me intellectually. I know better than you do, even about what’s good for you. Your opinions aren’t worth listening to carefully or taking s...