Our brain is a circuit board with neurons and terminals ready to be wired. We are born free, then programmed to obey our parents, to tell the truth, pass exams, pursue and achieve, love and propagate, age and fade unfulfilled and uncertain what it ha...
" she cried out. She would have a fresh bruise there by the time she went to sleep, somewhere out at sea. she told herself, Syrio stepped back. "You are dead now." Arya made a face. "You cheated," she said hotly. "You said left and you went right." "...
If a man like that is killed, there is always another to take his place. That is not the important thing. But to act so that no man dares to strike you because he knows you speak the truth, to act so that you can no longer be arrested because you are...
For my own part, my constant prayer is that I may know the worst of my case, whatever the knowledge may cost me. I know that an accurate estimate of my own heart can never be otherwise than lowering to my self-esteem; but God forbid that I should be ...
I'm going to make it very hard. I love you and I'm tired of being told what I should want and what I should do. You and I got married and I can stomp my foot and scream and rail at you because of the deal you made with my father, but the truth is I w...
Men have dragged us by our hair through the ages, and whether they give us crumbs or bright, shiny rocks, they truly give us nothing at all. If you have not opened your legs for them so that they could drawl out as babies or crawl in as men, they the...
We could call you an ambisexual. A duosexual. A—” “Do I really have to find a word for it?” Kyle interrupts. “Can’t it just be what it is?” “Of course,” I say, even though in the bigger world I’m not so sure. The world loves stupi...
I’ve witnessed, incognito, the gradual collapse of my life, the slow foundering of all I wanted to be. I can say, with a truth that needs no flowers to show it’s dead, that there’s nothing I’ve wanted - and nothing in which I’ve placed, eve...
Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose and their truths, and even make us laugh about ourselv...
It is one thing to read the Scriptures and affirm their truth. But until you are in the trenches of trial, until you are faced with life circumstances that test your faith, until you are pressed to the absolute limit of your physical and emotional ca...
When you aren't drinking or using drugs or spending lots of money on fancy toys or basking in the glow of fame or working all the time or eating your way through the refrigerator, being hateful and angry is a very handy shield from the truth. It lets...
It's what you have always wanted to accomplish. Everyone, when they are young, knows what their destiny is. At that point in their lives, everything is clear and everything is possible. They are not afraid to dream, and to yearn for everything they w...
A likely story indeed!" said the Pigeon, in a tone of the deepest contempt. "I've seen a good many little girls in my time, but never one with such a neck as that! No, no! You're a serpent; and there's no use denying it. I suppose you'll be telling m...
Although the view that, once discovered, ideas can be imitated for free by anybody is pervasive, it is far from the truth. While it may occasionally be the case that an idea is acquired at no cost—ideas are generally difficult to communicate, and t...
Two things are to be remembered: that a man whose opinions and theories are worth studying may be presumed to have had some intelligence, but that no man is likely to have arrived at complete and final truth on any subject whatever. When an intellige...
My needs were covered by layer upon layer of denial. I was scrambling for reasons. But the truth was, even if he had had a successful career, I would have used it as an excuse to complain about neglect. He could never actually win. I was running a ve...
Thus the vocation of the baptized person is a simple thing: it is to live from day to day, whatever the day brings, in this extraordinary unity, in this reconciliation with all people and all things, in this knowledge that death has no more power, in...
We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century - the blindness about which posterity will ask, "But how could they have thought that?" - lies where we have never suspected it... None of us can fully escape this blindness, b...
Anna Petrovna: Kolya, my dearest, stay at home. Ivanov: My love, my unhappy darling, I beg you, don't stop me going out in the evenings. It's cruel and unjust on my part, but let me commit that injustice. It's an agony for me at home. As soon as the ...
I was beginning to understand something I couldn't articulate. It was a jazzy feeling in my chest, a fluttering, a kind of buzzing in my brain. Warmth. Life. The circulation of blood. Sanguinity. I don't know. I understood the enormous risk of tellin...
We're human. We all occasionally wet ourselves. No one is really better than anyone else. We're just all trying to make it through the year as best we can. We screw up sometimes. We succeed sometimes. We laugh. We cry. We go on. Those are the things ...
