But for now, the future, like the past, means nothing. For now, there is only a homestead built of trash and scraps, at the edge of a broken city, just beyond a towering city dump; and our arrival-hungry, and half-frozen, to a place of food and water...
She’s the latest freshest fruit of our great American evolution. She’s the self-made girl! (…) Well, to begin with, the self-made girl’s a new feature. That, however, you know. In the second place she isn’t self-made at all. We all help to ...
Our relationship to the past is marked by deep indifference, even if we do say something to the contrary, even if we mean what we say when we say it is a matter of the greatest significance. Because it is a matter of the greatest significance, yet ne...
We must not be so ready to fancy ourselves intentionally injured. We must not expect a lively young man to be always so guarded and circumspect. It is very often nothing but our own vanity that deceives us. Women fancy admiration means more than it d...
. . .the sorrows of the heart yearn to be erased, for one final atonement finite and forgetting and whole—but time in its preserving will not permit forgetting; destroying only when we can no longer beg or argue with time to preserve the brief beni...
On the one hand, if God is wiser than we His judgement must differ from ours on many things, and not least on good and evil. What seems to us good may therefore not be good in His eyes, and what seems to us evil may not be evil.
We tell ourselves that intimacy (and marriage) takes two people who are willing to work at it-but, unfortunately, we rarely have the slightest inkling of our "job" assignments in this project.
We accept gods that don't speak to us. We accept gods that would place us in a world filled with injustices and do nothing as we struggle. It's easier than accepting that there's nothing out there at all, and that, in our darkest moments, we are trul...
I jerk around and see Sister Dora, a portly woman who's the head cook in the kitchen, staring daggers at me. This is nothing new. She stares daggers at everyone who walks through the lunch line holding a tray, as though our needing sustenance is a pe...
But when the group is literally capable of changing our perceptions, and when to stand alone is to activate primitive, powerful, and unconscious feelings of rejection, then the health of these institutions seems far more vulnerable than we think.
Purification and redemption are such recurrent themes in ritual because there is a clear and ubiquitous need for them: we all do regrettable things as a result of our own circumstances, and new rituals are frequently invented in response to new circu...
It might be said of Miss [Djuna] Barnes,” [T.S. Eliot] wrote, “who is incontestably one of the most original writers of our time, that never has so much genius been combined with so little talent.
A library should fill our leisure with adventure. It is a refuge from the commonplace and the dull, a sanctuary where all the trials, the tribulations, and the boredoms of the outer world are forbidden and where such an evil thing as a tax-collector ...
Destroy us, land and forest takes forever from your children. Walk the circle of life. Have no fear. Together, let us love and protect our children, respect the land and forest, giving back what we have taken.
The outrageous madonna/whore duality that we mock in Women’s Studies 101 has its subtle, and very insidious, expression in the good/bad mother paradigm that we grapple with every day of our lives.
Those people cannot enjoy comfortably what God has given them because they see and covet what He has not given them. All of our discontents for what we want appear to me to spring from want of thankfulness for what we have.
Our mind takes an inventory of past events and uses them to project the probability of success in the future. Depending on the information it gathers, we either move forward—or the fear response is triggered and forward progress is circumvented. Pa...
The fiendlike skill we display in the invention of all manner of death-dealing engines, the vindictiveness with which we carry on our wars, and the misery and desolation that follow in their train, are enough of themselves to distinguish the white ci...
I suppose that saves us from having to determine what to do with a butler who goes around killing people. It certainly reflects badly upon our domestic staff. Still, I shall miss him. There was a man who knew how to brew a good cup of tea.
It is our determination to overcome fear and discouragement that constitutes the only effective antidote to the sense of powerlessness over unwanted feelings.
To The Veterans of the United States of America Thank you, for the cost you paid for our freedom, thank you for the freedom to live in safety and pursue happiness, for freedom of speech (thus my book), and for all the freedoms that we daily take for ...
