I'm a writer and this is what I do no matter what name we put to it. Year by year, the world is turning into a darker and stranger place than any of us could want. This is the only thing I do that has potential to shine a little further than my immed...
And this is the ultimate lesson that our knowledge of the mode of transmission of typhus has taught us: Man carries on his skin a parasite, the louse. Civilization rids him of it. Should man regress, should he allow himself to resemble a primitive be...
If you are a twin, you watch yourself live two lives–yours and hers. It’s constant comparison. I am never as good as the bad I wanted her to be. I was the only soldier I needed. We couldn’t haven known what splitting would mean. Time speeds pas...
When I have been listened to and when I have been heard, I am able to re-perceive my world in a new way and to go on. It is astonishing how elements that seem insoluble become soluble when someone listens, how confusions that seem irremediable turn i...
Perfection of effort is not required, by the way. It is the consistency of attempting to work these tools that brings the progress. It’s like anything else. If I want to tone muscle, lifting a ten-pound weight a few times every day will move me tow...
I think the function of suffering is to let me know that my perception is skewed; what I’m doing is judging natural events in such a way that I am creating suffering within myself. For instance, you have pain over certain conditions, certain situat...
Didn’t your mom teach you to not creep up on a girl in a hearse?” I snapped even though I knew my situation wasn’t normal at all, and no mom taught their kid that. He chuckled lightly as he stared at me, humour in his eyes. “No. Actually miss...
Many years later he looked through one of my books and said, "How did you learn all this, Isaac?" "From you, Pappa", I said. "From me? I don't know any of this". "You didn't have to, Pappa", I said. "You valued learning and you taught me to value it....
On our way back to her house, I didn’t look at the city lights any longer. I looked into the sky and felt as if the moon was following us. When I was a child, my grandmother told me that the sky speaks to those who look and listen to it. She said, ...
Do you love him?" I blurted out. Laadan swallowed and a long pause followed. In the gap, I heard someone moving around in the kitchen. I started to grin. "You like him." Looking away, her lips pursed. I nudged her with my elbow. "You like him a lot."...
Still the dream persists, suppressed but always there, that somehow by some miraculous effort of the heart what was done could be undone. What form would such atonement take that would turn back time and bring the dead to life? None. None possible, n...
Well,’ you may ask, ‘how may I know when I am in love?’ . . . George Q. Morris [who later became a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, gave this reply]: ‘My mother once said that if you meet a girl in whose presence you feel a desire...
Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties -- all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my name's Dave and I live in a one-by-one box of bone ...
I watch the ground. If I don't step on any paper thorns then it means I'll see him... Stooping to pick up a lucky bean, I decide that if I find five lucky beans, I ll see him... I scan the sky for signs. If I see an eagle,definitely, definitely I ll ...
When her grandchildren would whine with words resembling 'I'm hungry', my Oma would tenderly correct us with 'No, you feel like eating' which to me seemed be the same thing. Oma had survived Amsterdam during WW1 and truly knew what hunger was. It is ...
Who or what do we truly need? In my opinion, anybody or anything that takes our spiritual life into harmotic state. I name it as love. For me love is harmonization of spiritual life; there cannot be any anger, anxiety, depression when you think of yo...
WIDE, the margin between carte blanche and the white page. Nevertheless it is not in the margin that you can find me, but in the yet whiter one that separates the word-strewn sheet from the transparent, the written page from the one to be written in ...
To what extent does anybody control his destiny? Life is very much like falling of the edge of a cliff. You have complete freedom to make all the choices you want to take on your way down. My characters choose to yearn and not lose hope even when the...
Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way round or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves. Empty your mind, be formless. Shapel...
What I Found in My Desk A ripe peach with an ugly bruise, a pair of stinky tennis shoes, a day-old ham-and-cheese on rye, a swimsuit that I left to dry, a pencil that glows in the dark, some bubble gum found in the park, a paper bag with cookie crumb...
Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way around or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves. Empty your mind, be formless. Shape...
