At a certain age our parents offhandedly start telling us things we’ve never heard before, about themselves and their families, their upbringing and history. They’re turning their lives into stories, trying to make sense of them in retrospect and...
Everything might scatter. You might be right. I suppose it's something we can't easily get away from. People need to feel they belong. To a nation, to a race. Otherwise, who knows what might happen? This civilisation of ours, perhaps it'll just colla...
Both friend and enemy reside within us. One lives by the rule of compassion, the other by the rule of hard knocks. Though potential influence of either extreme is inevitable, our actions bear witness to the one we embrace.
Peace is something tangible. It silences the outgoing energy of the mind and feeds the aspiring heart. Peace is not merely the absence of quarreling and fighting. True peace is not affected by the roaring of the world, outer or inner. This sea of pea...
The men stop coming after Hunt goes missing. We learned from the last brave soul to visit that they whispered all sorts of stories to answer his disappearance. My favorite is that we ate him. We cooked him up with our whore-earned corn, a dozen rats�...
How does one develop compassion for someone with a completely different set of values without reading something from their point of view? Books are one of the ways in which we can truly get into the heads of people we would never meet in our ordinary...
What is about to happen is not the reclaiming of Earth by a triumphant Mother Nature, a karmic repudiation of humanity's arrogant ill stewardship. Nothing we ever did mattered one way or another. This event has always been in the cards for man's plan...
Women are also property in our bible; adultery is a property crime in the Old Testament, not a sex crime.
For a wonderful physical tie binds the parents to the children; and—by some sad, strange irony—it does not bind us children to our parents. For if it did, if we could answer their love not with gratitude but with equal love, life would lose much ...
Children, be curious. Nothing is worse (I know it) than when curiosity stops. Nothing is more repressive than the repression of curiosity. Curiosity begets love. It weds us to the world. It's part of our perverse, madcap love for this impossible plan...
Do you know about Hanuman, sir? He was the faithful servant of the god Rama, and we worship him in our temples because he is a shining example of how to serve your masters with absolute fidelity, love, and devotion. These are the kinds of gods they h...
Whilst it may be our species greatest achievement, responsible for every technological advance we have or ever will make, science is also poop and sex and boogers.
And it wasn't just us. It wasn't just that we were high school, me a junior and you a senior, with our clothes all wrong for restaurants like this, too bright and too rumpled and too zippered and too stained and too slapdash and awkward and stretched...
America is especially sensitive to war weariness, and nothing brings backlash like the perception of defeat. I say “perception” because America is a very all-or-nothing society… We like to know, and for everyone else to know, that our victory w...
If a man is unmarried, he is called a bachelor. If a woman is unmarried, she is called a spinster or an old maid. What is it about an unmarried woman that poses such a threat to the patriarchal order? Mainly, it is that women are no one's property wh...
I don't think everyone wants to create the great American novel, but we all have a dream of telling our stories-of realizing what we think, feel, and see before we die. Writing is a path to meet ourselves and become intimate.
The other night my grandpa stopped breathing. I thought he was trying to set a world record for holding his breath, but after ten minutes of me cheering him on, he had to be boring and go and die on us and totally spoil our dinner. The good news was ...
Are you two you know?" Jacob pointed at us. " " I didn't get a chance to answer. Cam spun me around and kissed me, right there between the two buildings. It was no friendly peck on the lips. When our tongues touched, my bag slipped off my arm and hit...
I was supposed to attend a conference in Toledo, but rather than travel, I lobbied City Counsel to change our town’s name to Toledo. I should be a politician. Not only would I save the taxpayers on travel expenses, but I could do my job without doi...
While we exert ourselves to grow beyond our humanity, to leave the human behind us, God becomes human; and we must recognize that God wills that we be human, real human beings. While we distinguish between pious and godless, good and evil, noble and ...
Hope, a word that can kill as well as save. A double-sided knife onto whose handle we all cling. If hope is our dreams, it takes courage to strive for those dreams; to not abandon hope as one of folly. A person lost can have hope of being found, but ...
