It's easier, somehow, if there's a reason for tragedy - lust or jealousy or hatred or revenge. We can find in these explanations an emotional tenor commensurate with the gravity of the act. There's something we recognize as human, a motive toward whi...
We ate our fill, but there was more left when we was done. 'It’ll be in the icebox if y’all want some more later on,' she told us. There weren’t no way I would have gone back and eat more. I knowed they was being extra nice to us right then, bu...
I don't know if you have any idea what a high school in Paris is like in this day and age in the posh neighborhoods—but quite honestly, the slummy banlieues of Marseille have nothing on ours. In fact it may even be worse here, because where you hav...
When we move, we are in a way de-structured by our movement something: we are both here and at the same time not here because we're already in the process of going elsewhere, if you see what I mean. To stop de-structuring yourself, you have to stop m...
God loves us just because of who we are, not because of what we do, not because we’ve got it all together, and not because of our efforts—or lack of effort . There is nothing we can do to make God love us any more, and there’s nothing we can do...
I don’t think our president is doing a good job, but I think he’s doing a great vacation.
Why must we cling to those who walk away instead of granting freedom? We must give the same liberty God gives to prodigals-an ability to let them go-or we'll be perennially bound to others for our happiness and effective service.
This sadness is one of the great trials of the human experiment. As far as we know, we are the only species on the planet who have been given the gift - or curse, perhaps - of awareness about our own mortality. Everything here eventually dies; we're ...
If Jupiter was in the ascendant when you were born, you are of a jovial disposition; and if you're not jovial but miserable and saturnine that's a disaster, because a disaster is a dis-astro, or misplaced planet. Disaster is Latin for ill-starred. Th...
In the end, though, maybe we must all give up trying to pay back people in this world who sustain our lives. In the end, maybe it's wiser to surrender before the miraculous scope of human generosity and to just keep saying thank you, forever and sinc...
[Science] dissipates errors born of ignorance about our true relations with nature, errors the more damaging in that the social order should rest only on those relations. TRUTH! JUSTICE! Those are the immutable laws. Let us banish the dangerous maxim...
We are all part of a universal game. Returning to our essence while living in the world is the object of the game. The earth is the game board, and we are the pieces on the board. We move around and around until we remember who we really are, and the...
How joyful to be together, alone as when we first were joined in our little house by the river long ago, except that now we know each other, as we did not then; and now instead of two stories fumbling to meet, we belong to one story that the two, joi...
It may be said, in broad-brush terms, that the primary purpose of life is the continuation of life. A deep program for survival and reproduction underwrites the complex cycles of life, in which death is the grand equalizer. There is, however, a pecul...
The desert could not be claimed or owned–it was a piece of cloth carried by winds, never held down by stones, and given a hundred shifting names... Its caravans, those strange rambling feasts and cultures, left nothing behind, not an ember. All of ...
Despair is not for the living but for those unable to rise and continue; they are the only souls with a right to it. It is an end where breath and strength and will have vanished, leaving no way to persevere. To sink into the abyss that is despair is...
And our ages never bothered her from the very beginning. I was married, but that didn’t matter, either. She seemed to consider things like age and family and income to be of the same a priori order as shoe size and vocal pitch and the shape of one�...
We love films because they makes us feel something. They speak to our desires, which are never small. They allow us to escape and to dream and to gaze into the eyes that are impossibly beautiful and huge. They fill us with longing. But also. they tel...
I love you,” was his reply. “I make myself keep on loving you, despite what you do. I've got to love you. We all have to love you, and believe in you, and think you are looking out for our best interests. But look at us, Momma, and really see us.
I loved that man as I have loved no one else. I do not say I loved him more than I love your mother. But that the way I loved him was different. But if you have heard there was anything improper in our bond, there was not. That was not what we were t...
Oh, don’t worry, I am perfectly aware of the fantasy involved here, but what we want is almost never exempt from the impossible. That barrier has very little meaning for me these days. Given what’s happened, is just a blind spot that dissolves if...
