To get from the tangible to the intangible (which mature artists in any medium claim as part of their task) a paradox of some kind has frequently been helpful. For the photographer to free himself of the tyranny of the visual facts upon which he is u...
See, I know how they do. White folks like to stay in those books. They carry and they keep and they dig in their books, like nothing matters that don’t get written in some book somewhere. Like that’s the only way they can know for sure what happe...
And when I speak, I don't speak as a Democrat. Or a Republican. Nor an American. I speak as a victim of America's so-called democracy. You and I have never seen democracy - all we've seen is hypocrisy. When we open our eyes today and look around Amer...
The sky is blue today, Max, and there is a big long cloud, and it's stretched out, like a rope. At the end of it, the sun is like a yellow hole..." Max, at that moment, knew that only a child could have given him a weather report like that. On the wa...
Most problems of teaching are not problems of growth but helping cultivate growth. As far as I know, and this is only from personal experience in teaching, I think about ninety percent of the problem in teaching, or maybe ninety-eight percent, is jus...
At home, my father ate all the most burnt pieces of toast. 'Yum!' he'd say, and 'Charcoal! Good for you!' and 'Burnt toast! My favorite!' and he'd eat it all up. When I was much older he confessed to me that he had not ever liked burnt toast, had onl...
Cats don’t have names,” it said. “No?” said Coraline. “No,” said the cat. “Now, you people have names. That’s because you don’t know who you are. We know who we are, so we don’t need names.” There was something irritatingly self...
It is a peculiarity of knitters that they chronically underestimate the amount of time it takes to knit something. Birthday on Saturday? No problem. Socks are small. Never mind that the average sock knit out of sock-weight yarn contains about 17,000 ...
Then, somehow, I got caught up in one of Kevin's World War II books - a book of excerpts from the recollections of concentration camp survivors. Stories of beatings, starvation, filth, disease, torture, every possible degradation. As though the Germa...
Burn wounds always elicited pain more terrible than anything else he had ever endured. He didn’t relish the idea of forcing himself to suffer through such agony. But it was necessary. Earth depended on them taking possession of the key. “It’s t...
Things are going up in fire and never been there." When she looked no wiser he said, "There was a warehouse in Finchley. Round between the bath shop and the Pizza Hut. I know there was because I used to go there and because I've it." He tap-tapped hi...
As I was fixing in the bathroom, I thought about how I used to tell my ex Anne that there was “no reality.” Light merely entered the eye and was translated into electrical signals which were translated into chemical signals translated into gestal...
«This summer's been a dream,» Ethan murmured. «I know.» «I just hate that we've only got one week before it ends.» «You've got it all wrong, Eth,» Alek said, gently running his hand through Ethan's surfer hair. «This summer's not the dream. ...
Everything has a spirit and it's all connected. If you think about that, if you live your life by it, then you're less likely to cause any hurt. It's like how our bodies go back into the ground when we die, so that connects us to the earth. If you du...
My greatest urge in life is to do nothing. It's not even an absence of motivation, a lack, for I do have a strong urge: to do nothing. To down tools, to stop. Except I know that if I do that I will fall into despair, and I know that it is worth doing...
To benefit from what the best teachers do, however, we must embrace a different model, one in which teaching occurs only when learning takes place. Most fundamentally, teaching in this conception is creating those conditions in which most--if not all...
A man who tells secrets or stories must think of who is hearing or reading, for a story has as many versions as it has readers. Everyone takes what he wants or can from it and thus changes it to his measure. Some pick out parts and reject the rest, s...
Actively, we are motivated by the never-ending desires of the self. We are compelled to pursue whatever the self imagines will satisfy its desires. We are convinced that satisfaction of desire is the source of true happiness. Yet the very nature of d...
The claim to a national culture in the past does not only rehabilitate that nation and serve as a justification for the hope of a future national culture. In the sphere of psycho-affective equilibrium it is responsible for an important change in the ...
If I could have made the change sooner I daresay I should never have given a thought to the literary delights of Paris or London; for life in the country is the only state which has always completely satisfied me, and I had never been allowed to grat...
do not only describe your situation, that event, that person, place or that thing. By describing, we limit our thoughts in pondering. We ought to prescribe. The sick describes his illness to the doctor and the doctor prescribes an antidote. We all do...
