When people say, "I've told you fifty times," / They mean to scold, and very often do; / When poets say, "I've written fifty rhymes," / They make you dread that they 'II recite them too; In gangs of fifty, thieves commit their crimes; / At fifty love...
Bad is that often wildlife trafficking is described as a “victimless” crime. Nothing could be further from the truth. Many of the trafficked items come from murdered animals; Rhinoceros Horn, Ivory and Tiger skins; and hundreds of thousands of bi...
Beauty in music is too often confused with something that lets the ear lie back in an easy chair. Many sounds that we are used to do not bother us, and for that reason we are inclined to call them beautiful. Frequently -- possibly almost invariably -...
: The ghosts ...are symbolic of those unresolved moments in history that linger, and affect the next generation. Sometimes this happens without that generation ever really knowing the truth of what has come before. This is so true of war, I think, wh...
(on teaching writing) So many writers come to class with one question dominant in their mind, 'How do I make a living from this?' It's a fair enough question and one I always try to answer well - but it saddens me that it so often overshadows the mor...
Snorkel through our vibrant menagerie of fish and marine life, each one of which has been clearly tagged and labeled for your convenience. Do you think the jokers at Sandals would do that for you? We’ve stocked our ivory reef with disparate creatur...
Indeed, "brute force" solutions are often characteristic of advanced cultures, not primitive ones. The Romans and their predecessors spent a long time figuring out how to build arches... and virtually all our buildings today use post-and-lintel const...
A person willing to fly in the face of reason, authority, and common sense must be a person of considerable self-assurance. Since he occurs only rarely, he must seem eccentric (in at least that respect) to the rest of us. A person eccentric in one re...
Westereners often think that the East is one vast Buddhist temple, which is rather like thinking the West is one vast Carthusian monastery. If the [Western people who like Buddhism] were to visit the East, he'd certainly experience many new things, b...
They tell you the story of Job so often to remind you when you lose it all, stay calm. I've always refused it. I hated the story. It made no sense, and then I developed the belief that religion’s only purpose is to keep the poor from murdering the ...
You know that crazy heart of yours? The one with lightning crackling and moonlight shining through it. The one you’ve been told not to trust because it often led you off the beaten path. The one so many have misunderstood your entire life. Trust it...
If we are seeking to serve the God of truth then we should really welcome truth from whatever source it comes. We shouldn’t fear the truth. Some of it will be from science, obviously, but by no means all of it. It will sometimes by perplexing, how ...
For obvious reasons, the relationship between novelists, the reviewing establishment and critics in general is chronically, and often acutely, edgy. A kind of low-intensity warfare prevails, with outbreaks of savagery. It is partly an ownership issue...
The victims of PTSD often feel morally tainted by their experiences, unable to recover confidence in their own goodness, trapped in a sort of spiritual solitary confinement, looking back at the rest of the world from beyond the barrier of what happen...
When I have too much information or too many choices, I often get confused. • When one wants to encourage another to learn what ”I know that you don’t know,” encourage them to engage in deep thought on a topic you suggest. Deep thought is a p...
It often feels like a tremendous amount of work is required to get an idea moving forward, like pushing a train uphill. But at a certain point, the thing takes on its own momentum, and takes unexpected turns. So it's that feeling of holding on, rathe...
Seasons of the heart. To get through what I must I'm often encased in ice and for months he chips away until he can see my face and after a while, I begin to thaw. As warmth and feeling returns, my emotions continue to build until my personality is s...
A relationship, of any kind, requires two. Some people want it all and expect it all, always looking outward, so often saying what they deserve, even more saying what they want, and all thinking another should provide it for them, but do they ever bo...
Hate. The word is thrown around as uselessly and as often as love is, and is used as a means in which to accuse and inflict damage; the weak-in-argument (weak in general) use it to discredit those with whom they disagree rather than dissect the issue...
Greed, envy, sloth, pride and gluttony: these are not vices anymore. No, these are marketing tools. Lust is our way of life. Envy is just a nudge towards another sale. Even in our relationships we consume each other, each of us looking for what we ca...
What I love about the sculpture is that it makes the bones that we are always walking and playing on manifest, like in a world that so often denies the reality of death and the reality that we are surrounded by and outnumbered by the dead. Here, is a...
