I should go so far as to say that embedded in the surrealistic frame of a television news show is a theory of anticommunication, featuring a type of discourse that abandons logic, reason, sequence and rules of contradiction. In aesthetics, I believe ...
Exposition is a mode of thought, a method of learning, and a means of expression. Almost all of the characteristics we associate with mature discourse were amplified by typography, which has the strongest possible bias toward exposition: a sophistica...
If those underlying conditions aren't treated, the return of those symptoms may cause us so much discomfort that we'll go back to using addictive drugs or alcohol to obtain relief. That's the primary reason there is such a high rate of relapse among ...
Now love doesn't stop at death - or if it does, it's a pretty poor sort of love! In fact, grief could almost be defined as the form love takes when the object of love has been removed; it is love embracing an empty space, love kissing thin air and fe...
Resting my head on the high-backed chair, I silently marvel at emotion so strong it can quite literally chase away all reason and good sense. It is something I have never experienced. I pity Frances for being victim to such devastating passions. But,...
College had once been my greatest aspiration; it stood for everything my mother did not—intellectualism, feminism, freedom. But being kidnapped had given me plenty of time to think, and somewhere between all that fear and dread, I'd realized that w...
It is a part of our nature to survive. Faith is an instinctive response to aspects of existence that we cannot explain by any other means, be it the moral void we perceive in the universe, the certainty of death, the mystery of the origin of things, ...
During the earliest attacks of Fear and intense unreality, I sometimes uttered these unconscious and shocking words: 'I should prefer to escape into madness to avoid this consuming fear.' Alas, I did not know what I was saying. In my ignorance I beli...
It seems to me that the moralist is the most useless and contemptible of creatures. He is useless in that he would expend his energies upon making judgments rather than upon gaining knowledge, for the reason that judgment is easy and knowledge is dif...
Problems may be solved in the study which have baffled all those who have sought a solution by the aid of their senses. To carry the art, however, to its highest pitch, it is necessary that the reasoner should be able to use all the facts which have ...
Gordie, the white boy genius, gave me this book by a Russian dude named Tolstoy, who wrote, 'Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.' Well, I hate to argue with a Russian genius, but Tolstoy didn't know Indians, ...
Why do people kill themselves? I think they do it when they can no longer find a reason to keep going. When nothing in heir lives is good enough to balance out the bad. And they do it when they no longer have the courage to carry on past some recent ...
Appreciate and celebrate other people’s success. Don’t grow envious or feel cheated when others achieve something you are trying to achieve. Instead, recognize that success comes with hard work, and be willing to work hard for your own chance at ...
Each of those churches shows certain books, which they call revelation, or the Word of God. The Jews say that their Word of God was given by God to Moses face to face; the Christians say, that their Word of God came by divine inspiration; and the Tur...
That many good men have believed this strange fable [Christianity], and lived very good lives under that belief (for credulity is not a crime) is what I have no doubt of. In the first place, . There are also many who have been so enthusiastically enr...
If I owe a person money, and cannot pay him, and he threatens to put me in prison, another person can take the debt upon himself, and pay it for me. But if I have committed a crime, every circumstance of the case is changed. Moral justice cannot take...
As to the fragments of morality that are irregularly and thinly scattered in those books [the Bible], they make no part of this pretended thing, revealed religion. ; and are nearly the same in all religions, and in all societies. The Testament teache...
I have shown in all the foregoing parts of this work that the Bible and Testament are impositions and forgeries; and I leave the evidence I have produced in proof of it to be refuted, if any one can do it; and I leave the ideas that are suggested in ...
I have always had a special affinity for libraries and librarians, for the most obvious reasons. I love books. (One of my first Jobs was shelving books at a branch of the Chicago Public Library.) Libraries are a pillar of any society. I believe our l...
Faint black stubble shadowed his jaw, indicating he was a bedtime shaver, not a morning man. She remembered the feel of that stubble. Against her throat. Her breasts, The inside of her thighs. --- He followed her back into the hall and then into her ...
Jennings saw this and held the gun up with his fingers splayed placatingly as if to show her that he wasn’t planning on using it. Not yet, anyway. “I don’t want to hurt you again, Lily,” he told her. “So just make sure you don’t do anythi...
