There is a magnificent, beautiful, wonderful painting in front of you! It is intricate, detailed, a painstaking labor of devotion and love! The colors are like no other, they swim and leap, they trickle and embellish! And yet you choose to fixate you...
The wilderness was the testing ground—the deciding place. It was a place of God revealing himself in a whole new and deeper way. Would his people trust him completely, confident in his goodness, wisdom, and power? Those who believed God to be who h...
Especially for me, growing up in such a small town in the middle of nowhere, the desire to be away was incredible. I wanted to see new lands, meet new people from the city, and meet people that were in much less fortunate situations than I was, so th...
Hollywood is in somewhat the same position as Las Vegas these days. It went from being the capital of sin to Disneyland, and now it's landed somewhere in between. It tries to keep the sins hidden away and outwardly present itself as a defender of Ame...
I understood that my family was rich in love but would probably never own the land my father, John, dreamed of owning. My mother, Willie Ella Mays Clarke, was a washerwoman for poor white folks in the area of Columbus, Georgia where the writer Carson...
When who you are naturally is not only considered a sin, but you're reviled for being that human being and you don't have any control over it, there are lots of issues that come into play. And it takes a lot of presence, determination, courage and sp...
I made a crash landing here on Earth on February 14, 1962, in the Shreveport Catholic Charities Home for un-wed mothers. The infamous Bonnie and Clyde lost their lives just miles from where I was born. Like outlaws ourselves, my birth mother and I we...
For most of human history, the main goal of states has been to conquer land and to achieve glory for their rulers, usually at others' expense. Then in recent decades it was all about GDP. It's only in very recent history that rulers have been willing...
My last vivid boyhood fright from books came when I was 15; I was visiting my uncle and aunt in Greenwich, and, emboldened by my success with 'The Waste Land,' I opened their copy of 'Ulysses.' The whiff of death off those remorseless, closely writte...
Much of the conventional analysis of India's stature in the world relies on the all-too-familiar economic assumptions. But we are famously a land of paradoxes, and one of those paradoxes is that so many speak about India as a great power of the 21st ...
I've often been asked what drives me, particularly through the last 50 years of abuse, and ridicule. What has kept me going is one word - care. I care enough about the land, the wildlife, people, the future of humanity. If you care enough, you will d...
Thank God I have the seeing eye, that is to say, as I lie in bed I can walk step by step on the fells and rough land seeing every stone and flower and patch of bog and cotton pass where my old legs will never take me again.
On landing at New York I caught the yellow fever. The kind man who commanded the ship that brought me from France took charge of me and placed me under the care of two Quaker ladies. To their skillful and untiring care I may safely say I owe my life.
When I grew up, I saw the moon landing, and I was fascinated watching them as a child, and that's what really turned me onto space and science fiction, and I started watching things like 'Lost In Space,' and that led me to 'Star Trek,' which was a ma...
Africa is the second-largest continent, a landmass second from Asia. It also is the second most populated continent, with 900 million people. In fact - coming back to the land mass - Africa is so big that you could fit in the continental United State...
By a route obscure and lonely Haunted by ill angels only, Where an eidolon, named NIGHT, On a black throne reigns upright, I have reached these lands but newly From an ultimate dim Thule -- From a wild, weird clime that lieth, sublime, Out of SPACE, ...
Like so many poor Ilokanos, my grandparents left their village, for it could no longer sustain them. The Ilocos is a narrow coastal plain where, so often, the mountain drops to the sea. Land hunger had always afflicted the Ilokanos and made them migr...
Every American autobiography, someone once said, is about one thing—escape. Look into the frightened heart of an American life, and you’ll find a compulsion to flee—a seed planted in the national character at the start by those ships sailing ou...
We owe each other a debt and we owe each other an obligation, and because of these fundamental American imperatives, there are things that we own in common with each other, and that we are obliged to protect for our posterity. The water. The trees. T...
To an observer situated on the moon or on one of the planets, the most noticeable feature on the surface of our globe would no doubt be the large areas covered by oceanic water. The sunlit face of the earth would appear to shine by the light diffused...
But I felt like I'd made a journey to the land of fairytales only to find out that the magical world was identical to the real one. Even in fairytales, the sun still burns, sand still works its way into your bikini bottoms, and the diner next door to...
