What is "grace"? It is God's own life, shared by us. God's life is love. By grace we are able to share in the infinitely selfless love of Him Who is such pure actuality that He needs nothing and therefore cannot conceivably exploit anything for selfi...
...human beings have a distorted view of risk. They don't see the whole picture. Our perceptions are twisted by stories in the media, by films, by our own personalities and experiences. So, despite the unlikely odds, we still worry about being raped ...
Are you reading?" I say. It's not that I don't think Finn can read or anything, but it's just - well, not what I expected to see. I figured Finn spent his time doing whatever it is guys who aren't Josh do when they aren't in school. Burping, or somet...
We face up to awful things because we can't go around them, or forget them. The sooner you say 'Yes, it happened, and there's nothing I can do about it,' the sooner you can get on with your own life. You've got children to bring up. So you've got to ...
Goodbye. Goodbye. I can't feel you anymore. The night is almost too beautifully pure for my soul to contain. I walk with my arms spread open under the big fat moon. Heroic weeds rise up from the cracks in the sidewalk, and the colored lights of the H...
If you look up to see a shooting star, you might miss the silver dollar on the sidewalk. But no matter where you look, or where you travel, you’ll never get lost or arrive late to your own death.
What do you take me for? That fool Socrates, who upheld the law at the cost of his own death – just to be ironic? I suspect that act was actually the result of his secret embarrassment of his hideous nose.
One spirit remained unaware of his presence, staring at Miss Parker with such longing that he reluctantly decided to let it stay. The spirit, a hollow-eyed girl with ringlets and clothing from long past, reached toward Percy, wishing to touch her. Al...
Mother is in herself a concrete denial of the idea of sexual pleasure since her sexuality has been placed at the service of reproductive function alone. She is the perpetually violated passive principle; her autonomy has been sufficiently eroded by t...
If I had been armed with a feminist understanding that no girl deserves to be called a slut, perhaps I would have fought back by reporting the harassment to my school's headmistress or another school authority, or at least I might have had the streng...
The new towns of the 1950s and '60s were nothing less than the spatial translation of alienation and control and in these cities power increasingly could relinquish the old forms of advertising in favor of 'the simple organization of the spectacle of...
Self-absorption in all its forms kills empathy, let alone compassion. When we focus on ourselves, our world contracts as our problems and preoccupations loom large. But when we focus on others, our world expands. Our own problems drift to the periphe...
I think it is important to recognize one’s power, one’s capacities, and one’s dreams. We were actually talking about this in the last men’s group we had. We were talking about these dreams they had as kids and how they just disappeared. They ...
She was looking into my eyes with that way she had of looking that made you wonder whether she really saw out of her own eyes. They would look on and on after every one else's eyes in the world would have stopped looking. She looked as though there w...
I do not know what, in the end, makes a person who they are. If we`re all born one way, or if we only arrive there after as series of chioces. The bible claims that the wicked act on their own desires and impulses, because God is good, only good, and...
If you never have sex you never gain a sense of power. You never gain a voice or an identity of your own. Sex is the act that separates us from our parents. Children from adults. It's by having sex that adolescents first rebel. And if you never have ...
Whereas life separates meaning from emotion, art unites them. Story is an instrument by which you create such epiphanies at will, the phenomenon known as aesthetic emotion...Life on its own, without art to shape it, leaves you in confusion and chaos,...
Selfishly, perhaps, Catti-brie had determined that the assassin was her own business. He had unnerved her, had stripped away years of training and discipline and reduced her to the quivering semblance of a frightened child. But she was a young woman ...
No matter how entertaining, diverse, concise, or detailed, a writing craft book is, it’s not going to work magic on you, it’s not going to suddenly make you a brilliant writer simply by reading it. You need to use what you read and learn in your ...
Promise me, man. If anything ever happens to me, promise me you'll take care of Angelina. She's something special, Micah. Heart way too big for her own good. I worry because she doesn't see everyone for who they are. She's too busy looking for the go...
It took Pueblo a few seconds to take in his surroundings. The first thing he realised was that he felt bruised all over; the second was that his clothes were waterlogged, even more than before, from the quicksand; and the third, was that he had lande...