The trick, of course, is to lose one day and come back to win the next. But that is possible only when we draw healthy pleasure and confidence from our creative processes.
There's a large strain of irony in our human affairs... Interwoven with our affairs is this wonderful spirit of irony which prevents us from ever being utterly and irretrievably serious, from being unaware of the mysterious nature of our existence.
Our task shouldn't be punishing the villains in our lives, but enlarging the God who heals us from all wounds.
The attempt to prevent our kids from struggling for fear it might scar their permanent records is, instead, scarring them for life.
To each his own way and his own prayer. God does not take us at our word. He looks deep into our hearts. It is not the ceremonies or rituals that make a difference, but whether our hearts are sufficiently pure or not.
Neither novels or their readers benefit from any attempts to divine whether any facts hide inside a story. Such efforts attack the very idea that made-up stories can matter, which is sort of the foundational assumption of our species.
The food was so good that with each passing course, our conversation devolved further into fragmented celebrations of its deliciousness: 'I want this dragon carrot risotto to become a person so I can take it to Las Vegas and marry it.
Were she better, or you sicker, then the stars would not be so terribly crossed, but it is the nature of stars to cross, and never was Shakespeare more wrong than when he had Cassius note, ‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars/But in ourselv...
I realize that sometimes death comes before you expect it. That while we are rarely prepared for our friends, family and loved ones to die, we are never prepared for our own deaths. Never prepared to reconcile our own regrets.
Sometimes, we feel conscious but unable to move our body. The first thing to do is focus in a prayer, then start to wink frequently. By this way, slowly but sure our body can be moved totally by our persistent willpower.
What fabrications they are, mothers. Scarecrows, wax dolls for us to stick pins into, crude diagrams. We deny them an existence of their own, we make them up to suit ourselves -- our own hungers, our own wishes, our own deficiencies.
I guess it was only fitting that to them PUNK was a four letter word. However, to people like Dylan and I-punk was our hearts-our souls. We grew up with a lot of uncertainties. To be a teenager isn't always pretty, and our music reflected that.
Does our purpose on Earth directly link to the people whom we end up meeting? Are our relationships and experiences actually the required dots that connect and then lead us to our ultimate destinies?
If we really believe the gospel we proclaim, we'll be honest about our own beauty and brokenness, and the beautiful broken One will make himself known to our neighbors through the chinks in our armor - and in theirs.
Although to our automatic brain, change always means potential danger. In order to calm that brain, it means embracing change so to turn on the light in our mind and open the door to our true potential.
Think back to yourself at age 18. I know I was mighty different than the Patti I am today. As we grow up, we grow out of our haircuts, our apartments and - often times - our romantic decisions.
Most of us pass our lives never once laying eyes on our own organs, the most precious and amazing things we own. Until something goes wrong, we barely give them thought. This seems strange to me. How is it that we find Christina Aguilera more interes...
Our dead are never dead to us until we have forgotten them: they can be injured by us, they can be wounded; they know all our penitence, all our aching sense that their place is empty, all the kisses we bestow on the smallest relic of their presence.
Such a simple concept, yet so true: that which we manifest is before us; we are the creators of our own destiny. Be it through intention or ignorance, our successes and our failures have been brought on by none other than ourselves.
And so I discovered that it is not on our own forgiveness any more than on our own goodness that the world's healing hinges, but on His. When he tells us to love our enemies, He gives, along with the command, the love itself.
Our minds are susceptible to the influence of external voices telling us what we require to be satisfied, voices that may drown out the faint sounds emitted by our souls and distract us from the careful, arduous task of accurately naming our prioriti...