As Buckingham talked, I couldn't help but remember that there's a reason they call us Gallagher Girls. It's not just because the youngest of us are twelve. It's also because our founder was under twenty. From the very beginning we have been discounte...
Yes, now you know. Now you know! That's what it was to be alive. To move about in a cloud of ignorance; to go up and down trampling on the feelings of those...of those about you. To spend and waste time as though you had a million years. To be always...
Mrs. Scatcherd raps Dutchy's knuckles several times with a long wooden ruler, though it seems to me a halfhearted penalty. He barely winces, then shakes his hands twice in the air and winks at me. Truly , there isn't much more she can do. Stripped of...
Radical space technologies never reach the public because unknown groups do not wish humanity to have access to the highest knowledge or the most advanced scientific inventions. Perhaps this suppression is out of fear that the masses may be able to e...
I always got a bit pissed off with those broadsheet sceptics who make their living being passionately angry about homeopathy, God, synchronicity or whatever, because it's as if they can't get past their emotions, and in their rage they become as fait...
We don't become gods because we think we are gods. That is only a sign of ego. We become gods when we realise that a part of the universal divinity lives within us; when we understand our role in this great world and when we strive to fulfil that rol...
It is a well known fact that Abraham Lincoln spent much of his spare time visiting wounded soldiers in Union Army hospitals. I've spent thirty years teaching history at Columbia and I don't think I've spent more than fifteen minutes in the freshman d...
Something is missing, and it's something not so easy to name as semiabsent husbands, not so easy to point to as a lack of work, or too much work, or a lack of adequate child care. It's the sense that life should have led up to more than it has. A sen...
I don't only act out of my character; my character reacts to my actions. Each time I why, even if I'm not caught, I become a little bit more of this ugly thing: a liar. Character is always in the making, with each morally valenced action, whether rig...
When I left you," he whispered, "you were already more beautiful than anything I dared to dream. In our years apart, my imaginings did their best to improve on your perfection. At night, your face was forever behind my eyes. And now I see that that v...
Reading a book about something can be an obstacle to doing it because it gives you the impression that you are doing what you are only thinking about doing. It is tempting to remain in the comfortable theater of our imagination instead of the real wo...
Students get the message bout what adults want. When 4th graders in a variety of classroomswere asked what their teachers most wanted them to do, they didn't say, "Ask thoughtful questions" or "Make responsible decisions" or Help others." They said, ...
When we pray, instead of trying to produce love in our souls toward God, we should be basking in God's love for us. How foolish to stay indoors in the cold, dark little room off the self, trying to turn on the light and turn up the heat, when we can ...
We want our delusions and will violently defend these when confronted. We want to believe that the job that is slowly choking us is good, because the effort it would take to change is too terrifying to contemplate. We never want to hear how badly we ...
In the doctrine of the Trinity,” wrote Herman Bavinck, “beats the heart of the whole revelation of God for the redemption of humanity.” As the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, “our God is above us, before us, and within us.” The doctrine of...
And even though the resurrection of Jesus, by itself, is meaningless apart from the unfolding biblical drama that begins with creation and leads to the consummation, nevertheless, by beginning with this unique event in history, we are led to a partic...
There's a lovely Hasidic story of a rabbi who always told his people that if they studied the Torah, it would put Scripture on their hearts. One of them asked, "Why on our hearts, and not in them?" The rabbi answered, "Only God can put Scripture insi...
They were contemplating moving into another house or, more exactly, loudly saying to each other, so as to be overheard by anyone who might be listening, that they were contemplating moving, when all at once the fiend was gone, as happens with the , t...
People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one's self. Of course, they are charitable. They feed the hungry and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked. Cou...
I really want to believe that when our Quiet Waters kids wake up in the middle of the night, scared, they’ll remember being in their bunks with John and Kate and Whit and me right there protecting them,” he said. “I hope we gave them that sense...
However gross a man may be, the minute he expresses a strong and genuine affection, some inner secretion alters his features, animates his gestures, and colors his voice. The stupidest man will often, under the stress of passion, achieve heights of e...
