We all have strengths and weaknesses. The best advice is to embrace, focus on, and nurture our strengths. Unless, of course, those strengths include exploiting the weaknesses of others. Then I suggest discovering new ones.
I remember thinking how easy it is to speak in clichés, to steal a line from pulp fiction and let it fall. We can only hover around the inexpressible with our words anyway, and there is comfort in saying what we have heard before.
Perhaps finding out that we carry New World history in our genes will transcend racial checkboxes altogether and enable Latino-Americans to rethink what America is supposed to look like.
I've always known we were two puzzle pieces that fit together in a hollow that is our pain. There was a time when I was certain we were too damaged not to destroy each other. Now I think we are saving each other.
The ancient Egyptians believed the god Anubis met each of us on the other side, and that he stood before a great scale on which our hearts were set. There each was weighed, tested, for its worth. Was this the heart I wanted measured?
They are distinct enough that our crude instruments can pick up the differences, yet both are healthy instances of that staggeringly improbable, exquisitely engineered system we call a human being.
This is a book about fracture. About the experiences that make up a life. About the pieces of me. Delving into naked emotion is a terrifying proposition. Digging into our souls to look for answers that may not be there is a ledge most of us avoid. An...
Though firm, we are never too firm, though we love fun, we never have fun in a silly way that makes us appear ridiculous, unless that is our intent.
Travel is the only context in which some people ever look around. If we spent half the energy looking at our own neighborhoods, we'd probably learn twice as much.
All we have is the story we tell. Everything we do, every decision we make, our strength, weakness, motivation, history, and character-what we believe-none of it is real; it's all part of the story we tell.
Without basic human values guiding us, we become morally bankrupt. Without love as our purpose, we become empty. Without understanding of both of these, we become lost.
These hands don't have magic." Daniel looked down at his palms. "But they can still do good, Kendra. Magic is extraordinary, a gift I will always marvel over. But it doesn't determine a person's worth, what they choose to believe in. Our dreams are f...
All we have is the story we tell. Everything we do, every decision we make, our strength, weakness, motivation, history, and character-what we believe-none of it is ; it's all part of the story we tell. But here's the thing:
Show no fear to your enemies. Only contempt. Never let anyone look down on you. You're just as good as any of them. I don't care who they are. Better in fact. In our world, Dagans are royalty and you, my son, are a prince.
Our town was small enough that I never developed a healthy fear of strangers. To me, they were exciting things, gift-wrapped and full of possibilities, the sweet smell of somewhere else wafting from them like perfume.
My larger point is that since each of us struggles daily with good and bad impulses, we might want to restructure our social institutions in order to make it a little easier to be good.
Perhaps the trick is to find a gentle use for memory. Learn to cup the small and glorious moments in our hands and treasure them, finding some solace this way. Otherwise all they do is remind us that we are too late. That what is lost is lost forever...
Lying mouth to mouth, kiss to kiss in the pillow dark, loin to loin in unbelievable surrendering sweetness so distant from all our mental fearful abstractions it makes you wonder why men have termed God antisexual somehow (p. 148)
When a man loves a woman, as our old troubadours used to say, even if he has heard or seen something that puts his beloved in a bad light, he should believe neither his ears nor his eyes, he should listen to his heart alone.
If we could all love each and every person that crosses our path a little bit more, we could attain inner peace with the knowledge that many people on this planet would be hurting a whole lot less.
God requires solitude and quiet – this is part of the way He instructs us to pray to Him. We are obligated through our Love to worship Him as He sees fit. This is not the law. This is the language of Love: we love Him in the way He chooses for us t...
