A loved husband is the companion of companions, the supreme sharer, and a happy wife often sounds trivial when she is really sampling and enjoying their mutual and unique confidence. But in doing it, she largely loses her power of independent decisio...
We are faced with choices every moment of our lives. Whatever choice we exercise must make us comfortable and at peace. Choices that are made out of fear and anxiety often do not lead to right action---Sasha Samy, Transcending Abuse & Betrayal.
Cats were often familiars to workers of magic because to anyone used to wrestling with self-willed, wayward, devious magic--which was what all magic was--it was rather soothing to have all the same qualities wrapped up in a small, furry, generally at...
I know the empathy borne of despair; I know the fluidity of thought, the expansive, even beautiful, mind that hypomania brings, and I know this is quicksilver and precious and often it's poison. There has always existed a sort of psychic butcher who ...
He pried Clara's arms loose and stood up, smoothing his wrinkled coat. Clara looked straight into his face. Her eyelids were red, but her gaze was like a lance. Dr. Wintermute had a sudden, uncomfortable conviction that she had seen into his soul. It...
I think of how sometimes God puts people together, maybe more often than we realize. We can disregard it, lie to ourselves, find the reasons why it's impractical. But something within the creation of them connects. I've been afraid of it. There is so...
God surely did not create us, and cause us to live, with the sole end of wishing always to die. I believe, in my heart, we were intended to prize life and enjoy it, so long as we retain it. Existence never was originally meant to be that useless, bla...
Logan looks up, registers my face and smiles immediately. I hold onto the back of a chair to steady my legs. Jeez, he’s got a nice smile; dimples appear in his chiseled cheeks and there is familiarity and warmth in his eyes. Real warmth, the likes ...
Good docents often begin by asking the viewer, “What do you see in this work?” The idea that the expert should be allowed to constrain the interpretation of others rightly offends our sensibilities about museums and art. It ought to offend us jus...
The country and culture commonly known as "America" had had a badly split personality all through its history. Its overt laws were almost always puritanical for a people whose covert behavior tended to be Rabelaisian; its major religions were all Apo...
Often we are identified with either the inner man or woman, while the other side is hidden and unexpressed. Outer relationships are a mirror of the relationship and communication between our own inner man and female side. Sometimes one side is domina...
If anyone says that the best life of all is to sail the sea, and then adds that I must not sail upon a sea where shipwrecks are a common occurrence and there are often sudden storms that sweep the helmsman in an adverse direction, I conclude that thi...
Fate. As a child, that word was often my only companion. It whispered to me from dark corners during lonely nights. It was the song of the birds in spring and the call of the wind through bare branches on a cold winter afternoon. Fate. Both my anguis...
What makes for a good marriage isn't necessarily what makes for a good romantic relationship. Marriage isn't a passion-fest; it's a partnership formed to run a very small, mundane and often boring non-profit business. And I mean this in a good way.
I often must sacrifice my own needs and desires for the purpose of giving my children what they need and modeling for them the depths of Christ's love. "...make myself available in the routine tasks and myriad interruptions of daily life b/c I believ...
Were I a Roman Catholic, perhaps I should on this occasion vow to build a chapel to some saint, but as I am not, if I were to vow at all, it should be to build a light-house. [Letter to his wife, 17 July 1757, after narrowly avoiding a shipwreck; oft...
Often, the best stories aren't when someone pulls one 180-degree turn, but when someone pulls 180 one-degree turns: the stories when someone experiences a slow and, at times, indistinguishable evolution; the stories where a million tiny steps produce...
To those of us who often procrastinate on the decision we feel intimidated by lack of education or any area of weakness. I relieve you with this statement: It is not how much you know that arms you with the tools of great decision making, but rather ...
She was afraid to suggest to him that to most people, nothing "happens." That most people merely live from day to day until they die. That, after he had been dead a year, doubtless fewer than five people would think of him oftener than once a year. T...
The poet, the artist, the sleuth - whoever sharpens our perception tends to be antisocial; rarely "well-adjusted", he cannot go along with currents and trends. A strange bond often exists between antisocial types in their power to see environments as...
Whatever may have been said of the satiety of pleasure and of the disgust which usually follows passion, any man who has anything of a heart and who is not wretchedly and hopelessly blasé feels his love increased by his happiness, and very often the...
