When you look more generally at life on Earth, you find that it is all the same kind of life. There are not many different kinds; there's only one kind. It uses about fifty fundamental biological building blocks, organic molecules.
Every soul is special. They’re all beautiful. They’re all far more significant than anyone on this rock realizes. I think when people are at their best, they’re acting in accordance with their soul. The ones who have gone bad don’t have bad s...
His eyes darted over the surface of my face. Like a moth to a blaze he was hesitant, seeming to crave my warmth but not its inevitable burn. He explored me from a distance with his unspoken desire, with the fear that touching me would set him to flam...
Most people would say they love animals, but the reality is, if your using animals for food, clothing, or entertainment, you're only considering the lives of certain animals, typically those of cats and dogs.
Writers often have the cleanest windows, floors, fridges and toilets, the most up-to-date filing system or the best record for returning calls or e-mails because, in the moment, just about any task seems more palatable than sitting down to write.” ...
I crave the violence of your affection. I ache for the way it jumbles my insides and makes my heart feel like it's harboring a thunderstorm. I've never felt more alive in all my time on this earth, as I have, being underneath your touch.
In some ways, I am able to feel more like a part of my family while I am missing them. It's normal to feel lonely when you are away from your loved ones, but it's queer to feel lonely while surrounded by family.
Management" of anything as complicated as a woods requires more humility than comes easily to our species, at least in its American incarnation.
That's right,' she told the girls. 'You are bored. And I'm going to let you in on a little secret about life. You think it's boring now? Well, it only gets more boring. The sooner you learn it's on you to make life interesting, the better off you'll ...
Of course, if I eat all of him, if I spare his brain, he'll rise up and follow me back to the airport, and that might make feel better. I'll introduce him to everyone, and maybe we'll stand around and groan for a while. It's hard to say what 'friends...
[N]o such thing as objective writing, . . . every inscription, every traveler's tale, every news account, every piece of technical writing, tells more about the author and his time than it does about the ostensible subject.
Bad writing is more than a matter of shit syntax and faulty observation; bad writing usually arises from a stubborn refusal to tell stories about what people actually do― to face the fact, let us say, that murderers sometimes help old ladies cross ...
When we share in each other's grief and pain, we lighten it. Or maybe we just give each other permission to feel it fully and, through that act of acceptance, the grief becomes more bearable. Because, like the rain, tears too have an end. And with de...
I believe I may assert that they were really in possession of deep and growing happiness. It ended. Well, we must be for ourselves in the long run; the mild and generous are only more justly selfish than the domineering- and it ended when circumstanc...
Nothing new about death, nothing new about deaths caused militarily. We scorched and boiled and baked to death more people in Tokyo on that night of March 9-10 than went up in vapor at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.
The Spirit teaches us how to participate with God in the restoration of all things; maybe the more common term for this would be mission...[I]t's a mission which connects our unique desires to the work of the Spirit to keep wooing creation back to th...
I just bought a can of brown paint. It’s more expensive than coffee, but I really hit the wall after I chug it.
An alder tree can't become an oak at will. A maple can't pick up its roots like legs, and stride, step by powerful step, along the shore to find the sun. And everything that ever said otherwise--all those years of school, and the plays and moving pic...
The sacred dimension is not something that you can know through words and ideas any more than you can learn what an apple pie tastes like by eating the recipe. The modern age has forgotten that facts and information, for all their usefulness, are not...
God himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages. And we are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality which surrounds u...
I thus found that the student who wishes for a shelter can obtain one for a lifetime at an expense not greater than the rent which he now pays annually. If I seem to boast more than is becoming, my excuse is that I brag for humanity rather than for m...