There was no mistake," he said. "You freely gave me a kiss because I kept silent about supposed engagement." Well, you could have been more gentlemanly about it," she said with a sniff. "If I'd been gentlemanly, you wouldn't have enjoyed it half as m...
The death of this honorable man upon this battlefield leaves all of us the poorer for his loss, yet so much the richer for the friendship and love and loyalty with which he gifted us in life. May his spirit speed unhindered to the other side to join ...
In great cities, spaces as well as places are designed and built: walking, witnessing, being in public, are as much part of the design and purpose as is being inside to eat, sleep, make shoes or love or music. The word citizen has to do with cities, ...
...ugly interlopers threaten to choke off your story, depriving it of much-needed nutrition, sunlight and water. Identify and cut those weeds – the life-sucking adverbs, the shade-killing descriptions that don’t move the story forward, the crowdi...
I had a dream about you. Too many people died that day for us to talk about love. But through the stench of rotting corpses, all I could think about was how beautiful you were and how much I wanted to avoid prison.
With wisdom comes pain, but once you’ve got wisdom, you can’t just say, “Oh wow! I didn’t know knowing would hurt this much” and try to give it back. Once you know, there’s no going back to blissful ignorance.
If I owned a retail store, I’d keep my shelves empty, so it appeared my product was so popular it was always sold out. Of course, I’d make no sales because I’d have no product to sell, but popularity plus exclusivity would just make people want...
The God of Romans 9–11 finds ways to show mercy, even when the facts clamor for judgment. This doesn’t sound much like Calvinism to me, but it does sound a whole lot like Jesus.
Love can often be misguided and do as much harm as good, but respect can do only good. It assumes that the other person's stature is as large as one's own, his rights as reasonable, his needs as important.
...each reader creates his own film inside his head, gives faces to the characters, constructs every scene, hears the voices, smells the smells. ...whenever a reader goes to see a film based on a novel that he likes, he leaves a feeling disappointed,...
I was never a pretty girl, so I wasn't the one to get the boy. I used to cast myself as a good sport. Sometimes I wonder if I do that too much with roles I play, because if I'm absolutely truthful, I quite like being the best friend, or the supportin...
Life is so full of unpredictable beauty and strange surprises. Sometimes that beauty is too much for me to handle. Do you know that feeling? When something is just too beautiful? When someone says something or writes something or plays something that...
I had a dream about you. You were so cute, and I was holding you for a long time. We went for a walk, happily strutting down the street. We saw a couple others but they weren’t having as much fun as we were. We arrived back home and I gave you a ki...
Who we are and how we engage with the world are much stronger predictors of how our children will do than what we know about parenting.
That's how it is for us servants. No one pays you much heed; mostly you're invisible as furniture. Yet you overhear a conversation here, and add a little gossip there. A writing desk lies open and you cannot help but read a paper. Then you find somet...
Home. It's being new and old all rolled into one. Measuring your new against old friends, old ways, old places, Knowing that as long as the old survives, you can keep changing as much as you want without the nightmare of waking up to a total stranger...
A true leader is responsible for his followers who have reposed their faith in his leadership. If an ordinary man fails, it is a personal failure. But when a leader fails, he shatters the entire ideologies, principles and morale of all those who foll...
You wouldn't believe how much harder it's getting for me to just leave my studio. It's really sad. In fact these days the only thing that gets me outside is when I say: Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck you. Fuck me. Fuck this. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
It's peculiar to me,' she said, 'that everybody pays so much attention to living and so little to dying. Why are these high-powered scientists always screwing around trying to prolong life instead of finding pleasant ways to end it? There must be a h...
The chief trouble with religion has been too much dependence upon names or words. People fail to discriminate. They do not think. Generally people who think for themselves, instead of thinking according to the rules laid down by others, are considere...
I pretty much drink a cup of coffee, write in my journal for a while, and then sit at a computer in my office and torture the keys. My one saving grace as a writer is that, if I'm having trouble with the novel I'm writing, I write something else, a p...
