I don't think he was knowable. I mean, when most people talk about knowing somebody a lot or a little, they're talking about the secrets they've been told or haven't been told. They're talking about intimate things, family things, love things," that ...
For this very short time in your life, and possibly never again, you will be given a very unique gift: a supremely rich environment with ample time, space, safety and people to explore whatever interests you intensely, to push yourself, to make mista...
Rich people don’t have to have a life-and-death relationship with the truth and its questions; they can ignore the truth and still thrive materially. I am not surprised many of them understand literature only as an ornament. Life is an ornament to ...
Fear has to be the opposite of God because it is the opposite of love. Fear is selfish, needy and focused on you. It makes no sense for God to want you in fear about Him or your life. It comes down to this: either God wants you to live in fear of Him...
Somewhere, beyond blackness, some tyrant host swaps breathing for airlessness to test me. I had no concept of myself, no link to the things I knew. It is hard to explain the lack of anything concrete to people who live in a world of objects, but ther...
Have you ever thought of yourself as a great being?Have you ever been deeply moved by a thought that came from inside? One day, I heard a voice inside me sincerely concerned for the future of the earth and humanity. That voice asked, Would a world wh...
…We were born vampires." "I thought you became –" "— vampires by being bitten? Dear me, no. Oh, we can turn people into vampires, it’s an easy technique, but what would be the point? When you eat… now what is it you eat? Oh yes, chocolate�...
When people have told me that because I am a Catholic, I cannot be an artist, I have had to reply, ruefully, that because I am a Catholic I cannot afford to be less than an artist.
Before she could let herself think, Clara burst from the door and bolted for the table. People just began turning when she grasped the guest and shoved him to the ground, the chair flying backwards. Wine and food spilled everywhere as he flung out hi...
I am Emma Woodhouse. I feel for her, of her and in her. I have a different sort of snobbism, but I understand her snobbism. Her priggishness. I admire it. I know she does wrong things, she tries to organize other people's lives, she can't see Mr Knig...
Our Nation, a great stage for the acting out of great thoughts, presents the classic confrontation between Locke's views of the state of nature and Rousseau's criticism of them... Nature is raw material, worthless without the mixture of human labor; ...
There's such a big difference between being dead and alive, I told myself, the greatest gift that anyone can give anyone else is life. And the greatest sin a person can do to another is to take away that life. Next to that, all the rules and religion...
...people who believe in God think God has put human beings on earth because they think human beings are the best animal, but human beings are just an animal and they will evolve into another animal, and that animal will be cleverer and it will put h...
I believed that I was approaching the end of my days without having tasted to the full any of the pleasures for which my heart thirsted...without having ever tasted that passion which, through lack of an object, was always suppressed. ...The impossib...
As I look around on Sunday morning at the people populating the pews, I see the risk that God has assumed. For whatever reason, God now reveals himself in the world not through a pillar of smoke and fire, not even through the physical body of his Son...
It is convenient for the old men to blame Eve. To insist we are damned because a country girl talked to the snake one afternoon long ago. Children must starve in Somalia for that, and old women be abandoned in our greatest cities. It’s why we will ...
I hear that in many places something has happened to Christmas; that it is changing from a time of merriment and carefree gaiety to a holiday which is filled with tedium; that many people dread the day and the obligation to give Christmas presents is...
But the thing which had made him fall for her, fall properly, was the way she seemed so calm and so quiet and so sad. Surrounded by noisy bankers showing off, and their variously pushy or beady or anxious or competitive wives, she seemed to be from s...
Encounter Jesus. Suffer with him to experience his life more fully. Be holy in your love for God and his church as God is holy in his love for you and his church. Imagine what awaits those who now walk by faith, when faith and hope give way to the fu...
In the final exam in the Chaucer course we were asked why he used certain verbal devices, certain adjectives, why he had certain characters behave in certain ways. And I wrote, 'I don't think Chaucer had any idea why he did any of these things. That ...
When you live in the United States, with the roar of the free market, the roar of this huge military power, the roar of being at the heart of empire, it's hard to hear the whispering of the rest of the world. And I think many US citizens want to. I d...
