People in Haiti eat dirt because it gives their starving bodies a false sense of satisfaction. But mud pies don't fill. They merely mask real hunger. [...] I saw the mud pies as a metaphor for the life of any Christian who has ever looked to somethin...
She told her therapist it reminded her of coming home the summer after her freshman year at Rutgers, stepping back into the warm bath of family and friends, loving it for a week or two, and then feeling trapped, dying to return to school, missing her...
Actors are so fortunate. They can choose whether they will appear in tragedy or in comedy, whether they will suffer or make merry, laugh or shed tears. But in real life it is different. Most men and women are forced to perform parts for which they ha...
It’s genius simmering, perhaps. I’ll let it simmer, and see what comes of it,” he said, with a secret suspicion all the while that it wasn’t genius, but something far more common. Whatever it was, it simmered to some purpose, for he grew more...
Perhaps real wisdom lies in not seeking answers at all. Any answer we find will not be true for long. An answer is a place where we can fall asleep as life moves past us to its next question. After all these years I have begun to wonder if the secret...
Secret ceremonies in which malevolent men and women cloaked in hooded robes, hiding behind painted faces and chanting demonic incantations while inflicting sadistic wounds on innocent children lying on makeshift alters, or tied to inverted crosses, s...
If you are not in control of your thoughts then you are not in control of yourself. Without self-control, you have no real power, regardless of whatever else you accomplish. If you are not aware of the thoughts that you are thinking in each moment, t...
Julia's unhappy relationship with the Inland Revenue was due to her omission, during four years of modestly successful practice at the Bar, to pay any income tax. The truth is, I think, that she did not, in her heart of hearts, really believe in inco...
His education had been neither scientific nor classical—merely “Modern.” The severities both of abstraction and of high human tradition had passed him by: and he had neither peasant shrewdness nor aristocratic honour to help him. He was a man o...
I have always believed in the power of collaboration. Early on in my professional career, I realized that you can't develop all the competencies you need fast enough on your own. Furthermore, if you don't collaborate, your ideas will be limited to yo...
They are funny little representatives of simplicity, of awareness. No one is more aware of themselves as these children are. They have nothing, have no one but us, have seemingly no reason to be hopeful...yet they are. They choose to be happy even th...
India, she now knew, would not be content staying in the background, was nobody's wallpaper, insisted in interjecting itself into everyone's life, meddling with it, twisting it, molding it beyond recognition. India, she had found out, was a place of ...
A traveller moves among real people in their own milieu and learns from them, soaking up their wisdom and philosophy, their way of being in the world. A tourist simply hops from one tourist highpoint to another, skimming across the surface, cramming ...
The war had been a daily thought, a continual consciousness in her life for two years, but never a real presence. Battles were things that were fought somewhere else, won somehow, by someone, and lost by someone else. Now as she stood by her own door...
Even when there were good wars to write about, writers such as Jane Austen wrote novels concerning marriage. They usually went like this: 'You're being a real jerk.' 'Sorry about that. I was secretly helping you.' 'Oh, you're wonderful! And you have ...
What we do when defeat stares us in the face is the real touchstone of character. But the very fact that success has time and again proved the means of awakening people to the knowledge of greater ability than they ever before dreamed they possessed,...
Whatever the unknown in Europe, it had to be better than the known in a small town, where truth was hidden behind smiles, pleasantries, and an abundance of stretch lace at weddings. Whatever, the yet-to-be-written truth about her own life, it seemed ...
Maybe we were together in another life...in a parallel universe, maybe our paths are not supposed to cross twice, maybe your arms are not supposed to go around me. I hear about you now & then, I wonder where you are & how you feel. Sometimes I walk b...
What Walter thinks is that people are like rivers. We never stay in the same place but jest keep flowing along, learning new stuff and picking up new experiences and changing all the time. So today’s you isn’t the same as yesterday’s you and wo...
Social media has helped make the world flatter and reduced the degrees of separation, leading to the situation where many can interact with people who, but for this platform, they may never have had the privilege to meet or speak with. That is the op...
Sometimes what we lack is the thrill of anticipation or the delay of gratification. We enjoy things far more when we've really desired them but had to wait for them. The real value is found in our self control and patience, which allows us to delay g...
