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 ...
While we pay lip service to the virtues of reading, the truth is that there is still in our culture something that suspects those who read too much, whatever reading too much means, of being lazy, aimless dreamers, people who need to grow up and come...
The noble buoyancy of her attitude, its suggestion of soaring grace, revealed the touch of poetry in her beauty that Selden always felt in her presence, yet lost the sense of when he was not with her. Its expression was now so vivid that for the firs...
I find that daydreams are oftentimes similar in this respect to real dreams, the kind we experience in an unconscious state. Our mind puts together scenic imagery and simulated interactions in a seemingly designless, irregular, and often circuitous m...
No matter how an individual views Satan, whether they believe that he is a real character or that he is just the product of literary scholars and imaginations, no one can deny that each one of us has an aspect of the devil within us. By studying the ...
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,...
Art, even the art of fullest scope and widest vision, can never really show us the external world. All that it shows us is our own soul, the one world of which we have any real cognisance. And the soul itself, the soul of each one of us, is to each o...
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 ...
A first impression works like a magic mirror; it reflects what intrigues us rather than echoing a truthful picture. A first impression is the creating of an imagined character, born from personal desires, perceptions, and biases. Though sparked by an...
Fiction may be about lying – on the surface, anyway – but fiction is about hiding the truth behind those lies. It's about using those lies to say something true and real. It's about showing the reader something. It's about making them feel. And h...
You are constantly being trained to be heroic only in the service of your masters - only in slaughter and sacrifice and subjugation. But there is no heroism in serving your masters. Real heroism is questioning why you have masters at all. All these s...
If we know that the inevitable setbacks and frustrations are phases of the natural cycle of creative processes, if we know that our obstacles can become our ornaments, we can persevere and bring our desires to fruition. Such perseverance can be a rea...
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...
I love coaching football, and winning a Super Bowl was a goal I’ve had for a long time. But it has never been my purpose in life. My purpose in life is simply to glorify God. We have to be careful that we don’t let the pursuit of our life’s goa...
I believe you have to write every day–make the time. It’s about having an organized mind instead of a chaotic and untidy one. There is a myth that writers are bohemian and do what they like in their own way. Real writers are the most organized pe...
Yet the experience of reading a novel has certain qualities that remind us of the traditional apprehension of mythology. It can be seen as a form of meditation. Readers have to live with a novel for days or even weeks. It projects them into another w...
There are times to listen to the people that believe in you during those days you don't believe in yourself. Sometimes you look in the mirror and it's fogged up; the person looking back a blurred image, but those folks that know you and love you see ...
I recognized the great monument from the illustration in the copy of /The Jungle Book/ that my mother kept in the top drawer of my bedside table. When I went with Sophia to the Taj Mahal for the first time, I was not as enchanted by the real mausoleu...
We do literature a real disservice if we reduce it to knowledge or to use, to a problem to be solved. If literature solves problems, it does so by its own inexhaustibility, and by its ultimate refusal to be applied or used, even for moral good. This ...
The gospel is unintelligible to most people today, especially in the West, because their own particular stories are remote from the story of creation, fall, redemption, and consummation that is narrated in the Bible. Our focus is introspective and na...
What out-of-the-way cause graze me grazed a lot, Undo me loose from the genuine ties of my destiny, What greater sin than a man’s blasphemy? If any to consume my inward person like the vile when hades burn still, If I know me well and I’m without...
