Our present idea of freedom is only the freedom to do as we please: to sell ourselves for a high salary, a home in the suburbs, and idle weekends. But that is a freedom dependent upon affluence, which is in turn dependent upon the rapid consumption o...
Everything in the least connected with him has value for me; if someone even mentions his name it is like a little present to me--and I long to mention it myself, I start subjects leading up to it, and then feel myself going red. I keep swearing to m...
London has the trick of making its past, its long indelible past, always a part of its present. And for that reason it will always have meaning for the future, because of all it can teach about disaster, survival, and redemption. It is all there in t...
Hope?” he says. “There is always hope, John. New developments have yet to present themselves. Not all the information is in. No. Don’t give up hope just yet. It’s the last thing to go. When you have lost hope, you have lost everything. And wh...
After it's all over, the early childhood, a chain of birthdays woven with candlelight, piles of presents, voices of relatives singing and praising your promise and future, after the years of schooling, fitting yourself into different size desks, memo...
There is no mystery to happiness. Unhappy men are all alike. Some wound they suffered long ago, some wish denied, some blow to pride, some kindling spark of love put out by scorn -- or worse, indifference -- cleaves to them, or they to it, and so the...
Pero si la historia de México que se enseña es aburrida no es por culpa de los acontecimientos, que son variados y muy interesantes, sino porque a los que la confeccionaron no les interesaba tanto presentar el pasado, como justificar el presente.
...if an organised body is not in the situation and circumstances best adapted to its sustenance and propagation, then, in conceiving an indefinite variety among the individuals of that species, we must be assured, that, on the one hand, those which ...
Memory, therefore, not simply as the resurrection of one’s private past, but an immersion in the past of others, which is to say: history - which one both participates in and is a witness to, is a part of and apart from. Everything, therefore, is p...
As for Elizabeth Bennet, our chief reason for accepting her point of view as a reflection of her author's is the impression that she bears of sympathy between them--an impression of which almost every reader would be sensible, even if it had not the ...
You don't get to decide what's to big a risk for me. You don't decide what's good for me and what isn't. That's my decision, Dylan. If you care about me so much, then how dare you do this all by yourself? I choose not to destroy my present because of...
When I read a novel I am not here. I am transported to far-off places, my eyes unseeing of the words on the page, busy with a scene being played out in my mind's eye, with my ears engaged, hearing the voices carry from the pen to the present. What a ...
The blessing hands of Christ are like a roof that protects us. But at the same time, they are a gesture of opening up, tearing the world open so that heaven my enter in, may become "present" within it.
Wait on the Lord" is a constant refrain in the Psalms, and it is a necessary word, for God often keeps us waiting. He is not in such a hurry as we are, and it is not his way to give more light on the future than we need for action in the present, or ...
So unworldly was he--or so capricious--that he frequently refused his help to the powerful and wealthy where the problem made no appeal to his sympathies, while he would devote weeks of most intense application to the affairs of some humble client wh...
Of course, we all go through our own experiences. If we do not push ourselves enough, we do not grow, but if we push ourselves too much, we regress. What is enough will change, depending on where we are and what we are doing. In that sense, the prese...
God presents His works embellished with color, meaning, and content in order to make Himself known and loved to those seeking Him. We are sent to this world with the responsibility, then, to affect and reshape things with His permission, to reflect o...
A story, I had learned, through my own constant knitting and reknitting of remembered words, can lead us back to ourselves, to our lost innocence, and in the shadow it casts over our present world, we begin to understand what we only intuited in our ...
Regarding Christians who feel they have a free pass on being criticized; When the blind worship of an invisible being and the doctrine of millennia-old texts written by ignorant men in another country becomes more important than real, present human b...
At Dachau. We had a wonderful pool for the garrison children. It was even heated. But that was before we were transferred. Dachau was ever so much nicer than Auschwitz. But then, it was in the Reich. See my trophies there. The one in the middle, the ...
Society functions in a way much more interesting than the multiple-choice pattern we have been rewarded for succeeding at in school. Success in life comes not from the ability to choose between the four presented answers, but from the rather more dif...
