But now I understand something more fully that I once only understood abstractly. I see how utterly ridiculous it is to think that the state can be the right means to help those who are poor or living at the margins of society. The state is their ene...
A brick is like fruitcake. You don’t want to use it up all at once, and in fact, you don’t want to use it up at all. Well, if you won’t use it, then give it to someone who will. Every other Christmas I get the gift of fruitcake—and I think it...
Rupert: "... At this rate, somebody is bound to upset the Warlock once too often, and we'll end up with a Court full of bemused looking toads." "He wouldn't dare use his magic here," said the Champion. "Don't bet on it," said Rupert. "The High Warloc...
The people through which the Tradition of the Sun spoke were people just like anyone else, and who, one morning or one evening, looked at the world and felt the presence of something greater. They had unwittingly plunged into an unknown sea, and, for...
All families have their secrets, most people would never know them, but they know there are spaces, gaps where the answers should be, where someone should have sat, where someone used to be. A name that is never uttered, or uttered just once and neve...
Australians love to pump you up when you're nobody. Then, when you start to put your head above water and say, 'Well, actually, I am a bit different, I am an individual and I do have a particular talent', or whatever, they want to go after you. But t...
You think aerobics is not a cool sport? I think you are wrong. It requires amazing discipline - flexibility, fitness, knowledge. And you have to do it with a big smile on your face. Also, I once performed in front of 10,000 screaming women. I tell yo...
Some people have the innate ability to cheat artfully during dating, interview... Once they're in, they completely change and become different that they leave you wonder whether you have ever met them before.
The ancients were afraid that if they went to the end of the earth they would fall off and be consumed by dragons. But once we understand that Christianity is true to what is there, true to the ultimate environment - the infinite, personal God who is...
... we [can] catch fish and just throw them back... it [doesn't] seem to hurt the fish much past a cut lip. But then... one [may] swallow the hook...[it'd be] a goner, whether we tried to pull it out or just cut the line. Because once you've swallowe...
Convincing - and confident - disciplines, say, physics, tend to use little statistical backup, while political science and economics, which have never produced anything of note, are full of elaborate statistics and statistical “evidence” (and you...
I told you not to drink that much water on the drive,” Sarah told her. “You never listen to me.” “Sorry I don’t have the bladder of a freaking sloth.” “You mean camel,” Sarah corrected. “I meant sloth,” the other girl said. “I r...
Were God to show grace to all of Adam's descendants, men would at once conclude that He was righteously compelled to take them to heaven as meet compensation for allowing the human race to fall into sin. But the great God in under no obligation to an...
Some of you have it ingrained in you. You weren't born with it. No baby has hate for anything. We were all babies once, right? This little guy doesn't care what country you were born in or what religion you might practice or how much you weigh or who...
He well knew his mind's natural tendency to be endlessly on a thousand subjects at once, to flit from this to that and to the next thing to no particular purpose--indeed, he called it his "butterfly mind.
Once I used my powers. Now I feel like a dancing instructor, reminding the queen whom she is dancing with at this hour and with which foot she should begin.' 'Be thankful,' Gavin advised with a laugh, 'that so far the music is still being played and ...
Martin is your best friend, isn't he?' a sweet and well-intentioned girl once said when both of us were present: it was the only time I ever felt awkward about this precious idea, which seemed somehow to risk diminishment if it were uttered aloud.
if you're a teenaged babysitter caring for a mute toddler in a remote Maine cabin during a once-in-a-century blizzard while and escaped killers (bearing a strange resemblance to the handicapped boy you and your friends bulled of an embankment and lef...
And someday when the descendants of humanity have spread from star to star they won’t tell the children about the history of Ancient Earth until they’re old enough to bear it and when they learn they’ll weep to hear that such a thing as Death h...
I once heard someone on the radio saying that a bee is never more than forty minutes away from starving to death, and this fact has stayed with me because it seems to have a certain personal resonance. My children are in a perpetual proximity to cata...
Love doesn’t have to be on Valentine’s Day. It doesn’t have to be by the time you turn eighteen or thirty-three or fifty-nine. It doesn’t have to conform to whatever is usual. It doesn’t have to be kismet at once, or rhapsody by the third d...
