...pretty much everyone hates high school. It's a measure of your humanity, I suspect. If you enjoyed high school, you were probably a psychopath or a cheerleader. Or possibly both. Those things aren't mutually exclusive, you know. I've tried to bloc...
While believing strongly, without evidence, is considered a mark of madness or stupidity in any other area of our lives, faith in God still holds immense prestige in our society. Religion is the one area of our discourse where it is considered noble ...
Do not fall in love with people like me. I will take you to museums, and parks, and monuments, and kiss you in every beautiful place, so that you can never go back to them without tasting me like blood in your mouth. I will destroy you in the most be...
they (who by their very nature are impatient) fling themselves at each other when love takes hold of them, they scatter themselves, just as they are, in all their messiness, disorder, bewilderment. And what can happen then? What can life do with this...
[M]ost people go through life a wee bit disappointed in themselves. I think we all keep a memory of a moment when we missed someone or something, when we could have gone down another path, a happier or better or just a different path. Just because th...
I eyed Dimitri, recalling a shadow in my periphery back in the ballroom. "You followed when I jumped in front of Lissa, didn't you? Who were you going for? Me or her?" He studied me for several long seconds. He could have lied. He could have given th...
To stay in recovery, you must be responsible for finding your own motivation. Remember, motivation may not be easy to come by at first. It will probably be a very small, timid part inside of you. When you find it, let that part be in charge. Let the ...
In my own life, as winters turn into spring, I find it not only hard to cope with mud but also hard to credit the small harbingers of larger life to come, hard to hope until the outcome is secure. Spring teaches me to look more carefully for the gree...
We advocate the atheistic philosophy because it is the only clear, consistent position which seems possible to us. As atheists, we simply deny the assumptions of theism; we declare that the God idea, in all its features, is unreasonable and unprovabl...
There is one more thing," said Mr. Peabody. "Now you must go and pick up all the feathers." ... "I don't think it's possible to pick up all the feathers," Tommy replied. "It would be just as impossible to undo the damage that you have done by spreadi...
Let us forget that we are Baptists, Methodists, Catholics, Presbyterians, or Free-thinkers, and remember only that we are men and women. After all, man and woman are the highest possible titles. All other names belittle us, and show that we have, to ...
To Vic and other kids his age, the past didn't exist except as a quick, oversimplified Wikipedia snippets, that ultimately didn't matter because they weren't now. Dolores wonders if that is all she really is, a little piece of now, relentlessly pushe...
Did people... really kiss like that? She had had NO idea. She had imagined being kissed, and in her imagination she had been swept away by the sheer romance of the meeting of lips. In her naivete she had not considered the possibility that a kiss, as...
Naturally I feel no shame in writing these things because of the time which separates the moment when they are written--when only I can see them--from the moment when they will be read by other people, a moment which I feel will never come. By then I...
One of the greatest tragedies of growing up is the discovery that your parents- and your teachers, and your sports heroes, and your favorite actors, singers, YouTube sensations- are fallible. Adults don't know all, and what they do know, they often w...
I kept thinking back to all those nights in Connecticut, when I was out the door as soon as dinner was over, yelling my plans behind me as I headed to my car, ready for my real night to begin—my time with my family just something to get through as ...
To commit the act of felo-de-se is a form of delusion. You see, my love, to leave one's life unfinished implies the possibility of success. What is left unlived may contain the potential truth one always seeks. Those who kill themselves do so with th...
What we, or at any rate what I, refer to confidently as memory--meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion--is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often...
You do not need to do many different exercises to get strong - you need to get strong on a very few important exercises, movements that train the whole body as a system, not as a collection of separate body parts. The problem with the programs advoca...
Quite possibly one of the most revealing passages about Shakespeare as a man comes from one of the roughest of the jottings made by gossip John Aubrey from his interview with William Beeston, son of the Christopher Beeston who had acted with Shakespe...
His wife had also studied art in her hometown, and she could paint, but depending on such work for her livelihood was just not possible. As far as appearances went, she was definitely a real beauty. When she was young, she looked a little like Gong L...
