Praying, we usually ask too much. I know I do. Sometimes we even demand. I think I am learning to ask enough for the moment--not for the whole year, utterly veiled in mystery; not even for the week, the month ahead; but just for today. Jesus said it ...
I couldn't think of anything I wanted to do or any place I wanted to be more than home. Where I can walk around the yard, sweeping leaves off the slate paths to my heart's content. Where I can spend all day in my pajamas puttering around the house, o...
You have returned from the lesser jihad to the greater jihad (jihad alakbar).” His followers asked him what that greater jihad was. “The struggle against your passionate soul,”2 he replied. ‘So what does this greater jihad entail?’ I asked ...
[The critic] serves up his erudition in strong doses; he pours out all the knowledge he got up the day before in some library or other, and treats in heathenish fashion people at whose feet he ought to sit, and the most ignorant of whom could give po...
Simpson, the student of divinity, it was who arranged his conclusions probably with the best, though not most scientific, appearance of order. Out there, in the heart of unreclaimed wilderness, they had surely witnessed something crudely and essentia...
Travis Sanchez rubbed a hand over his head as he stepped into an elevator at the Red Stone Security building. His Mohawk was gone and he wore his hair in a buzz cut these days. It was probably his military background, but he always came back to this ...
As inexplicable as the accidents that set it off, our imagination is a crucial privilege. I've tried my whole life simply to accept the images that present themselves to me without trying to analyze them. I remember when we were shooting That Obscure...
Don’t you think it’s actually harder for you . . . to adapt, I mean? Because you’ve done all that stuff?’ ‘Are you asking me if I wish I'd never done it?’ ‘I’m just wondering if it would have been easier for you. If you’d led a smal...
I couldn't help but suspect something he'd seen or encountered had changed his view of what had happened between them. It had somehow set him free. And he'd let it fly, that gorgeous blackbird of a love he'd been keeping in a cage. What was it like f...
What I must do is die now. I must accept the justice of death and the injustice of life. I have lived a good life - longer than many, better than most. Tony died when he was twenty. I have had thirty-two years. I couldn't ask for another day. What di...
The relevant question is not whether back then a few extraordinary individuals could overcome a system strongly weighted against them or whether today an admittedly far greater number requiring far less talent can succeed. The real question is whethe...
I put on slight music I could ignore and started to write. The type of this music I most favored they no longer made. Turns out they asked around one day and I was the only one enjoying it so they decided to just stop making it. Most of the bands tha...
...some have asked me what understanding of Nature one shapes from so strange a year? I would answer that one's first appreciation is a sense that creation is still going on, that the creative forces are as great and as active to-day as they have eve...
Finally Exi spoke. "There are some important things to remember always, no matter how hard life presses at you. One of these things is that wherever you are, and no matter for how long, there must be a home to hold you. You cannot know who you are un...
One day, when I thought I was alone, I prayed in church. While making this offering before the cross, a parishioner came up to me, put her arm around my shoulder and prayed, ‘Dear God, please heal Father Jim. And give me his cancer.’ I was incred...
...TV was entertainment of the last resort. There was nothing on during the day in the summer other than game shows and soap operas. Besides, a TV-watching child was considered available for chores: take out the trash, clean your room, pick up that m...
If you’d rather skip lunch, that’s fine with me. I’ve got some things to take care of anyway before I can leave the store to Robin for the weekend.” “I don’t want to skip lunch,” he bit out. “I’m starving.” Her temper got the bett...
She saw how he was staring at it, the bright red hue beneath her bonnet. She could not bear to see the way he was looking at her—right through her—without seeing her. He did not see a woman. He did not see Jane, the woman he had been so passionat...
In the midst of aches in the joints, anxiety over the payment of bills, concern for the safety of those you love, envy of the rich, fear of robbers, dog-weariness at the end of a long day, and the unacceptable slipping away of youth, there does occas...
The fleeting systems lapse like foam,'" he mumbled what was evidently a quotation. "That's it—foam, and fleeting. All man's toil upon the planet was just so much foam. He domesticated the serviceable animals, destroyed the hostile ones, and cleared...
My letters! all dead paper, mute and white! And yet they seem alive and quivering Against my tremulous hands which loose the string And let them drop down on my knee to-night. This said, -- he wished to have me in his sight Once, as a friend: this fi...
