You mean the day they stop needing the church," Vittoria challenged, moving toward him. "Doubt is your last shred of control. It is doubt that brings souls to you. Our need to know that life has meaning. Man's insecurity and need for an enlightened s...
A crowd whose discontent has risen no higher than the level of slogans is only a crowd. But a crowd that understands the reasons for its discontent and knows the remedies is a vital community, and it will have to be reckoned with. I would rather go b...
The acquisition of knowledge always involves the revelation of ignorance - almost is the revelation of ignorance. Our knowledge of the world instructs us first of all that the world is greater than our knowledge of it. To those who rejoice in the abu...
Kate lost a mother," I said, "but I lost a nothing." Kate doesn't feel that way," Jack assured me. But what about everybody else besides Kate? How can I ever explain to anyone what she was when she and I had no name? People need names for everything....
When I was in school I studied biology. I learned that in making their experiments scientists will take some group--bacteria, mice, people--and subject that group to certain conditions. They compare the results with a second group which has not been ...
I told her that I didn't want to take any drugs. That I had come here not to take drugs. "Listen," she said, not unkindly, "up until now I would say that ninety-nine percent of all the narcotics you have taken in your life you bought from guys you di...
There are matters in that book, said to be done by the express command of God, that are as shocking to humanity, and to every idea we have of moral justice, as any thing done by Robespierre, by Carrier, by Joseph le Bon, in France, by the English gov...
I was also one of those people who hadn’t caught up with the latest social networking site. Maura belonged to most of them. She passed most evenings befriending men who had tried to date-rape her in high school, but I was still stuck in the last vi...
I’d write and read and let myself, a little at a time, step down into myself- like a stairway down into a dark, intimate kiva- where the work of vigil is taking place, the necessary attending. I imagine there’s a little fire burning in there, a f...
I went to interview some of these early Jewish colonial zealots—written off in those days as mere 'fringe' elements—and found that they called themselves or—it sounded just as bad in English—'The Bloc of the Faithful.' Why not just say 'Party...
I was terrified of death by the time I was three or four, actively if not lucidly. I had frequent nightmares about snakes and scary neighbors. By the age of four or five, I was terrified by my thoughts. By the time I was five, the migraines began. I ...
The great mistake of contemporary life is that we have made such a virtue of intellectual growth while almost totally ignoring the necessity of conscience growth. We have failed to understand that individual evolution can take place not only in menta...
THE MYTH OF THE GOOD OL BOY AND THE NICE GAL The good of boy myth and the nice gal are a kind of social conformity myth. They create a real paradox when put together with the "rugged individual" part of the Success Myth. How can I be a rugged individ...
There's a good kind of crazy, Kaylee," he insisted softly, reaching out to wrap his warm hand around mine. "It's the kind that makes you think about things that make your head hurt, because not thinking about them is the coward's way out. The kind th...
On game days, I could be in the worst mood imagiable-a really bad mood. But sometimes, I'd get a call from the Make-A-Wish Foundation-there would be people, sometimes kids, who anted to meet me before they died. And the foundation would call on a gam...
. And this great and wonderful man had to die! When the mighty heart, of his mighty body, that supplied the blood to his mighty brain, burst, never again was there to fall from his eloquent lips the pearls of thought that had been so wondrously forme...
Darkness. The door into the neighboring room is not quite shut. A strip of light stretches through the crack in the door across the ceiling. People are walking about by lamplight. Something has happened. The strip moves faster and faster and the dark...
I notice he doesn't have his meteorite bag and see out the window it's probably going to pour any minute, but wee need to et out of here. Immediately. "We're going to search for meteorites," I say, like that's what most people do on winter mornings. ...
[A]s people are beginning to see that the sexes form in a certain sense a continuous group, so they are beginning to see that Love and Friendship which have been so often set apart from each other as things distinct are in reality closely related and...
Finally Bill Mixter would lower his head, lay his bow upon the strings, and draw out the first notes of a tune, and the others would come in behind him. The music, while it lasted, brought a new world into being. They would play some tunes they had l...
I feel as though I should say something profound, or enact some rite, or trade something to make it official. I want to transfer some trinket which would allow me to say that she's my girl, some kind of currency that proves to people that she likes m...
