When Benedict dies, he will have the pleasure of standing before whatever furious God he believes in, to answer for how it was that he knew for undeniable fact that one -- if not dozens -- of his priests repeatedly molested, abused and/or raped young...
But let it not be said that we did nothing. Let not those who love the power of the welfare/warfare state label the dissenters of authoritarianism as unpatriotic or uncaring. Patriotism is more closely linked to dissent than it is to conformity and a...
I'll say it again - mental illness is a physical illness. You wouldn't consider going up to someone suffering from Alzheimers to yell, "Come on, get with it, you remember where you left your keys?" Let us shout it from the rooftops until everyone get...
No, not at all. I’m an atheist. You could say that I’m agnostic, but that’s just a certain kind of atheist (laughs). An atheist is someone who lacks a belief in a supernatural, and that’s me. I can’t say with absolute certainty that there i...
Your love life is insignificant when it comes to raising your children to be respectable human beings. The moment you see them suffer or lower their standards because of your selfishness, is the day you should realize that nothing matters more than t...
Sometimes it's your fragrance that comes to me, out of the blue, on a crowded road in a Sunday afternoon. But more often, it's memories of us that cross my mind almost every lone evening. All I want is to lessen the pain I feel every night. But every...
And at 3am you sit near the window and wonder if there is magic... because all you need are some fairies to take your pain away and help you sleep... you take a book to read... you take a pen and a paper to write...you cling on some music that might ...
Everything can change in a heartbeat; it can slip away in an instant. Everything you trust, and treasure, whatever brings you comfort, comes at a terrible cost. Health is temporary; money disappears. Safety is nothing big an illusion. So when the m...
When people come to speak to me, whatever they say, I am struck by a kind of incandescence in them, the 'I' whose predicate can be 'love' or 'fear' or 'want,' and whose object can be 'someone' or 'nothing' and it won't really matter, because the love...
Most people do not erode their self-esteem over big issues but over small ones, little acts of betrayal and hypocrisy forgotten (repressed) very quickly. But the computer in your subconscious mind forgets nothing. It records your spiritual profit and...
I personally never expected anything of Obama, and wrote about it before the 2008 primaries. I thought it was smoke and mirrors [...] I don't usually admire Sarah Palin, but when she was making fun of this 'hopey changey' stuff, she was right, there ...
Why does one begin to write? Because she feels misunderstood, I guess. Because it never comes out clearly enough when she tries to speak. Because she wants to rephrase the world, to take it in and give it back again differently, so that everything is...
He had thrown himself away, he had lost interest in everything, and life, falling in with his feelings, had demanded nothing of him. He had lived as an outsider, an idler and onlooker, well liked in his young manhood, alone in his illness and advanci...
It was only a smile, nothing more. It didn't make everything all right. It didn't make ANYTHING all right. Only a smile. A tiny thing. A leaf in the woods, shaking in the wake of a startled bird's flight. But I'll take it. With open arms. Because whe...
Whether it's men, women—it doesn't really matter. The human race is filled with passion and lust. And to coin terms like heterosexuality, homosexuality or even bisexuality makes no sense to me. You are human. You love who you love. You fuck who you...
You kissed me.' I tear my eyes away from the mirror to face her. We are close, so close standing here. My lungs might be carved out of granite, cast from bronze, the way they refuse to expand, to fill with air. 'You kissed me back,' says Kat softly. ...
When my pals in high school were starting to drink, it always looked unappealing to me. I would be at a big party and see one of the popular girls or football players completely wasted and puking and acting a fool, and think to myself, There’s noth...
Surely our people do not understand even yet the rich heritage that is theirs. There can be nothing in the world more beautiful than the Yosemite, the groves of giant sequoias and redwoods, the Canyon of the Colorado, the Canyon of the Yellowstone, t...
In the books I have written, I have created in my mind a universe. My kids say I have a village in my head and I live in that village, and it's true. When I start writing a book, characters from previous books reappear. All my emotions, my mind, my h...
One of the things I do take some pride in is that if you had never read an article about my life, if you knew nothing about me, except that my books were being set in front of you to read, and if you were to read those books in sequence, I don't thin...
I believe in love. I believe in good stories. I play really hard on the weekends because I like to have those stories. My wife and I go off and do craziness all the time. We're just like, 'What can we go get into this weekend?' Then we have other one...
