Pasha: I used to admire your poetry. Zhivago: Thank you. Pasha: I shouldn't admire it now. I should find it absurdly personal. Don't you agree? Feelings, insights, affections... it's suddenly trivial now. You don't agree; you're wrong. The personal l...
Joey Naylor: Do I have flexible morals? Nick Naylor: Let's say you became a lawyer and you were asked to defend a murderer worse than that, a child murderer now, the law states that every person deserves a fair trial, would you defend him? Joey Naylo...
A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a k...
Never invest in any kind of relationship with anyone who is not willing to work on themselves just a little every day. A person who takes no interest in any form of self-improvement, personal development or spiritual growth will also not be inclined ...
Of course, I'd like to have fake legs. I would dance with a boy and then afterwards pull up my dress to show him my fake legs, just to watch him fall over from the shock of it. I'd do that with a hundred boys until I found the one who got down on his...
But into the first decades of the twentieth century, even at the New York Times, it was uncommon for journalists to see a sharp divide between facts and values. Yet the belief in objectivity is just this: the belief that one can and should separate f...
Remember, sex is never a thing you just had. Sex is the intercourse, the merging or convergence, of who the two of you are—your spirits merging. People ask, “How was it for you?” The reply is often, “It was great.” But is this really the ri...
Many people want God to call them to a big assignment. However, they try to bypass the love relationship...the love relationship is why God created you. That is far more important to Him than what you do. So anticipate that God will start working wit...
... people universally tend to think that happiness is a stroke of luck, something that will maybe descend upon you like fine weather if you're fortunate enough. But that's not how happiness works. Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You...
An even more pointed example of the the power of the silence tabu in libraries occurred in Duluth in 1981. The police were pursuing a fugitive from justice who ran into the public library. Uniformed police surrounded the building, and the library dir...
There's a lot for you to live for. Good things are definitely in your future, Leonard. I'm sure of it. You have no idea how many interesting people you'll meet after high school's over. Your life partner, your best friend, the most wonderful person y...
(We loved Mother too, completely, but we were finding out, as Father was too, that it is good for parents and for children to be alone now and then with one another...the man alone or the woman, to sound new notes in the mysterious music of parenthoo...
It's not arrogant to say that you can't figure out the answers to the universe with your internal faith. It's not arrogant to know that there's no omniscient, omnipotent prime mover in the universe who loves you personally. It's not sad to feel that ...
But then his parents changed. A year of California had changed them. They stopped sending money. Greg was forced to go out into the world, to interact with real people. And he was glad of this. He had always wanted to be a normal person. To be at eas...
Soul ties. The thing that can make you hear an old-school slow jam and think of somebody you haven’t seen in years. Soul ties. The thing that makes old people who’ve been together for years finish each other’s sentences. Don’t you wish mama h...
All these years, her sole objective had been to keep still and hope no one would ever know. She had been a mistress of stillness. She had mastered the simulation of peace without a wisp of real peace, like a nun from a silent order who was screaming ...
I always wake up early in a strange bed. I looked at Bertrand, I wonder about him. There was a sort of easy grace in whatever he did, He didn't talk much. I watched this boy sleeping beside me. God, was he tall, and handsome. I was surprised, during ...
Dr. Blockhead's mocking face was solemn for once. 'Modern science is wiping out deviant strains of the human form,' he said. 'In the twenty-first century, genetic engineering will do more than merely eliminate Siamese twins and alligator-skinned peop...
It sometimes seemed so peculiar and wrong to her that you could be that intimate with someone, to go to sleep with them and wake up with them, to do really quite extraordinarily personal things together on a regular basis, and then, suddenly, you don...
Thus the vocation of the baptized person is a simple thing: it is to live from day to day, whatever the day brings, in this extraordinary unity, in this reconciliation with all people and all things, in this knowledge that death has no more power, in...
Personally, I think sex should be like math. At school. No one really cares if they're crap at math. They even proclaim it. They'll say to anyone, "Yeah, I don't mind science and English, but I'm absolutely shithouse at math." And other people will l...
