means you feel the pulse of other people's pain as well as your own, and saying it means you take a share of it. And so it binds us together, makes us trodden and sodden as one another. is a lot of things. It's a hole refilled. A debt repaid. is the ...
But then the subject turned to the spiritual life and Meg talked about her many visits to ashrams in India and her admiration for Swami Muktananda and Gurumayi. That got in the way, especially because he told her of his skepticism regarding the guru ...
I am, as far as I can tell, about a month behind Lord Byron. In every town we stop at we discover innkeepers, postillions, officials, burghers, potboys, and all kinds and sorts of ladies whose brains still seem somewhat deranged from their brief expo...
Some people may think that it is a dangerous attitude to take toward the Bible, to pick and choose what you want to accept and throw everything else out. My view is that everyone already picks and chooses what they want to accept in the Bible...I hav...
there is a widespread notion in some of the most energetic contemporary Christian movements that the biblical call to reconciliation is solely about reconciling God and humanity, with no reference to social realities. In this view, preaching, teachin...
When people pose the question, are you “coxom”, Tom Conrad? I like to pose a question back at them: Is J.K. Rowling actually a witch? Is Thomas Harris the no. 1 serial killer in the the US, did Yann Martell really spend a lifetime eating pie? Of ...
Break the glass, I thought to myself, because it is a symbolic gesture. Try to understand that within myself, things were breaking of much more importance than a glass, and I’m happy for that. Look to your own inner struggles and break this glass. ...
Pitiful is the person who is afraid of taking risks. Perhaps this person will never be disappointed or disillusioned; perhaps she won’t suffer the way people do when they have a dream to follow. But when that person looks back – and at some point...
Not everyone is allotted the chance to become a personality; most remain types, and never experience the rigor of becoming an individual. But those who do so inevitably discover that these struggles bring them into conflict with the normal life of av...
I've been talking to myself a lot lately. I don't know what that's about, but my mother was the same way. She hated to make small talk with other people, but get her into a conversation with herself and she was quite the raconteur. She would tell her...
I felt despair. The word’s overused and banalified now, despair, but it’s a serious word, and I’m using it seriously. For me it denotes a simple admixture — a weird yearning for death combined with a crushing sense of my own smallness and fut...
I think falling in love should come with a warning label: CAUTION—side effects may include breaking up, accompanied by heartache, severe mood swings, withdrawal from people and life itself, wasted hours obsessing over bitter reflections, a need to ...
On a strange and devious way, Siddhartha had gotten into this final and most base of all dependencies, by means of the game of dice. It was since that time, when he had stopped being a Samana in his heart, that Siddhartha began to play the game for m...
None of us asked for this life. I, of all people should know that our paths were chosen for us and we were just along for the ride, doing what was necessary and expected. There were far greater forces at work here. He was playing my heartstrings, whi...
The Secret Garden was what Mary called it when she was thinking of it. She liked the name, and she liked still more the feeling that when its beautiful old walls shut her in no one knew where she was. It seemed almost like being shut out of the world...
each year India produces thousands upon thousands of eighteen-year olds who have little to no instructed idea of the last sixty years of Indian history. They have no idea if or how those five-year plans worked. They have no idea if or how the Non-Ali...
He said focus. The word focus. I hear angels singing. Everything goes dark except for a light that beams down on Sean. It is a God-given sign- like when people see the Virgin Mary in their grilled cheese, except this isn't religious and I'm actually ...
The mystery of the MAGIC BATHROOM will be revealed unto thee... The table next to the sink is for flashcards. I say a Monty Python skit called, "Every sperm is sacred," and it gave me the idea that, "every piss is sacred." Meaning, why not look at fl...
Often when he was not working he had come here and sat an entire afternoon, lulled by the din and music from the other rooms into a state of vague ecstasy, while he contemplated the small sheet of water outside the window. It was that happy frame of ...
It seemed my whole life was composed of these disjointed fractions of time, hanging around in one public place and then another, as if I were waiting for trains that never came. And, like one of those ghosts who are said to linger around depots late ...
- Got us a full moon too coming tomorrow night. Just make things a whole lot worse. All we need. - Why is that? - What’s that, Marshal? - The full moon. You think it makes people crazy? - I know it does.- Found a wrinkle in one of the pages and use...
