There are all kinds of silences and each of them means a different thing. There is the silence that comes with morning in a forest, and this is different from the silence of a sleeping city. There is silence after a rainstorm, and before a rainstorm,...
She was a free bird one minute: queen of the world and laughing. The next minute she would be in tears like a porcelain angel, about to teeter, fall and break. She was brave, and I never once saw her cry out of fear. She never cried because she was a...
If you walked into your local convenience store and bought a package of cigars, you would notice that it carries a label warning of the potential dangers of cigar smoke. Yet research suggests that cigar smoking poses a hazard only to moderate to heav...
Yet on some level we do know the truth. We know that meat production is a messy business, but we choose not to know just how messy it is. We know that meat comes from an animal, but we choose not to connect the dots. And often, we eat animals and cho...
All the best and worse things in us are bound up in the legacy of our family. As children we ardently trust in the stability or, in some cases, the instability we were born into. No matter which...we embraced what was decent while simultaneously supp...
A man needs to feel powerful and respected. Innately within us, as far back as we can remember, we have taught ourselves to grand stand in our abilities to be tough, to conquer, to impress and to win in all aspects of our lives in order to be validat...
He took the pen and book from her and faltered. “Just write anything – anything trivial that won't matter if it comes to pass.” “Erm...” God, he was useless at this. Elena's hair turned blue. “Hey!” “What?” “I don't want blue hair...
Keep in mind too, our failures serve to teach us, and usually teach us more than our successes do. What we may perceive as a failure is also an opportunity for someone else to rise to the occasion and perform a mitzvah, or mitzvot. Do not begrudge so...
In treating people as less important than things, work becomes both demoralised and demoralising and we become blind to the moral content of our decisions...Money and wilfful blindness make us act in ways incompatible wiht what believe our ethics to ...
For you see, the face of destiny or luck or god that gives us war also gives us other kinds of pain: the loss of health and youth; the loss of loved ones or of love; the fear that we will end our days alone. Some people suffer in peace the way others...
Lou reluctantly drew back, still holding Joe, and placed his soft lips on Joe's own. Existence reacted to their reunion. Immediately, it was as if two halves became whole once again. The sky flashed colors overhead as they stood together: day to nigh...
Barbara was not much for prayer. She prayed at church and repeated The Lord’s Prayer every morning before she began her day, but apart from that, she did not rely much on prayer. Barbara had a theory that God was going to do whatever He wanted to a...
Here I was just thinking all these wonderful things about you and now you’re trying to strip down before we can have sex.” His hands casually held in the air, he explained, “I was hot.” “It’s seventy degrees in here.” His hands went to ...
Could I speak to you for a moment, madam?' said Nannie to Agnes. It was at moments of crisis like this that Mary chiefly envied her Aunt Agnes's imperturbable disposition. Most mothers feel a hideous sinking at the heart when these fatal words are pr...
I am made to think, not for the first time, that in my writing I have plunged ahead-head-on, heedlessly one might say-or 'fearlessly'- into my own future: this time of utter raw anguished loss. Though I may have had, since adolescence, a kind of inte...
In truth, he had always considered the sight of men eating croissants slightly ridiculous, especially at the beginning, when for the first bite they had to maneuver the point of the crescent into their mouths. No matter what a person did, he ended up...
Sydney's the kind of port that leaves a mark on a sailor," the old man mused. "Really?" Haakon said, wondering what the man meant. "It did on me," he said, opening up his shirt to display his chest. It was covered with tattoos! At the top, SYDNEY was...
Do you wanna go out for lunch? In celebration?” I asked and then touched my lips in thought. “Or we could swing by the store and get something really good for dinner?” Wesley glanced at me sideways with a puzzled expression I couldn’t figure ...
I suggested in my last sermon that if Oolon Colluphid had tracked down the "God" who had left a message in five mile high letters of fire on the Quentulus Quazgar Mountains, he still wouldn't have found the person who actually created the The Hitchhi...
A man journeyed to a place Where the road caused him to ponder, Should he travel the wide, clear road? Or should he venture up the other? The wide road was more often traveled, It was level and easy and clear. The narrow one seemed barely a path, Wit...
We've come a long way from the time when the crowning achievement in a woman's life was her youthful marriage. And many would agree that this represents progress for women. But when did the search for someone to marry become self-absorbed and patheti...