It's the rule of the wilds. You must be bigger, and stronger, and tougher. A coldness radiates through me, a solid wall that is growing, piece by piece, in my chest. He doesn't love me. He never loved me. It was all a lie. "The old Lena is dead." I s...
I have to admit that I'm up to my neck in frivolity, buried in dresses to the point of ruin! Fifteen different garments! My wardrobe jam-packed! My girl, this is not the way for an old woman to behave - particularly since you never wear anything but ...
There were elements of Mad Men at Newsweek, except that unlike the natty advertising types, journalists were notorious slobs and our two- and three-martini lunches were out of the office, not in...Kevin Buckley, who was hired in 1963, described the N...
Laura knew then that she was not a little girl any more. Now she was alone; she must take care of herself. When you must do that, then you do it and you are grown up. Laura was not very big, but she was almost thirteen years old, and no one was there...
I know its totally senseless to attempt to write something 'great' in a time where people seem mostly concerned with bashing each other heads in, there's only 1 bestseller a year that a 12 year old would find tedious, and the entire Human Race will p...
There is one key area in which Zuma has made no attempt at reconciliation whatsoever: criminal justice and security. The ministers of justice, defence, intelligence (now called 'state security' in a throwback to both apartheid and the ANC's old Stali...
Listen, I'll share some of the wisdom I learned over the years. When you near the end of your life... when you're a lonely old man... you start realizing what your accomplishments are really worth. The most brilliant clue I ever deciphered, the milli...
The more vast the amount of time we've left behind us, the more irresistible is the voice calling us to return to it. This pronouncement seems to state the obvious and yet it is false. Men grow old, the end grows near, each moment becomes more and mo...
I now wish that I had spent somewhat more of my life with verse. This is not because I fear having missed out on truths that are incapable of statement in prose. There are no such truths; there is nothing about death that Swinburne and Landor knew bu...
Sermon On the Mount: "You have heard it said of old..." "Jesus was referring to the 'letter of the Mosaic law' of the OT then went on to illustrate that He embodied the fulfillment of that 'law' and that now we may walk in the 'Law of the Spirit' the...
War is not two great armies meeting in the clash and frenzy of battle. War is a boy being carried on a stretcher, looking up at God’s blue sky with bewildered eyes that are soon to close; war is a woman carrying a child that has been injured by a s...
I am here alone for the first time in weeks, to take up my "real" life again at last. That is what is strange - that friends, even passionate love, are not my real life unless there is time alone in which to explore and to discover what is happening ...
I did not know then how much was ended. When I look back now from this high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young....
Maycomb was a tired old town, even in 1932 when I first knew it. Somehow, it was hotter then. Men's stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon after their three o'clock naps. And by nightfall were like soft teacakes with f...
There are no mistakes in Zentangle, so there is no need for an eraser. If you do not like the look of a stroke you have made, it then becomes only an opportunity to create a new tangle, or transform it using an old trusty pattern. A Zentangle tile is...
Asif Ali maneuvers the gleaming Mercedes down the labyrinthine lanes of Old Kolkata with consummate skill, but his passengers do not notice how smoothly he avoids potholes, cows and beggars, how skilfully he sails through aging yellow lights to get t...
I made cranberry sauce, and when it was done put it into a dark blue bowl for the beautiful contrast. I was thinking, doing this, about the old ways of gratitude: Indians thanking the deer they'd slain, grace before supper, kneeling before bed. I was...
If magic is energy, then using it is about guiding it's flow rather than possessing it and squirreling it away. Some people seem to me to approach magic as though adding spells and charms and even gurus to their museum – sometimes a secret museum. ...
Though I do not believe in the order of things, still the sticky little leaves that come out in the spring are dear to me, the blue sky is dear to me, some people are dear to me, whom one loves sometimes, would you believe it, without even knowing wh...
I guess you can call me "old fashioned". I prefer the book with the pages that you can actually turn. Sure, I may have to lick the tip of my fingers so that the pages don't stick together when I'm enraptured in a story that I can't wait to get to the...
For nearly four years you have had an Administration which instead of twirling its thumbs has rolled up its sleeves. We will keep our sleeves rolled up. We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace--business and financial monopoly, speculation, r...