If we were to gain God's perspective, even for a moment, and were to look at the way we go through life accumulating and hoarding and displaying our things, we would have the same feelings of horror and pity that any sane person has when he views peo...
I realized that I was okay with myself. I was quirky and withdrawn and loud, but I liked that. I smiled at strangers without thinking they were going to attack me and drag me into their cars. I went to doctors’ offices and touched magazines that ha...
The old man in the beard he felt convinced was wrong. He was too busy saving his own soul. Wasn't it better to take part even in the crimes of people you loved, if it was necessary hate as they did, and if that were the end of everything suffer damna...
Love is the mistery between two people, not the identity. We were at the opposite poles of humanity. Lily was humanity bound to duty, unable to choose, suffering, at the mercy of social ideals. Humanity both crucified and marching towards the cross. ...
It is not the state of war that isolates. It is well known, it brings people together. But in the battlefield -- that is something different. Because that is when the real enemy, death, appears. I no longer saw any warmth in numbers. I saw only Thana...
Mothers were much too sharp. They were like dogs. Buster always sensed when anything was out of the ordinary, and so did mothers. Mothers and dogs both had a kind of second sight that made them see into people's minds and know when anything unusual w...
Fed on a media diet of really bad news, we live in a perpetual state of repressed panic. We are paralyzed by bad knowledge, from which the only escape is playing dumb. Ignorance becomes empowering because it enables people to live. Stupidity becomes ...
My life and most people's lives are a series of little miracles -- strange coincidences which spring from uncontrollable impulses and give rise to incomprehensible dreams. We spend a lot of time pretending that we are normal, but underneath the surfa...
When I review my travels among the astronauts, my mind's eye goes first to the Houston shopping mall where Alan Bean sat for hours after returning from space, just eating ice cream and watching the people swirl around him, enraptured by the simple ye...
Is it too much to ask, to live in a world where our human gifts go toward the benefit of all? Where our daily activities contribute to the healing of the biosphere and the well-being of other people?
Everybody is taken in at some period or another. [...] In marriage especially. [...] There is not one in a hundred of either sex, who is not taken in when they marry. Look where I will, I see that it is so; and I feel that it must be so, when I consi...
Everybody's heart is like a cup. They stumble from place to place and person to person, trying to get them filled. They get cracked, those cups, and even broken. Some people throw them away, thinking that it will stop the pain. Poor fools. Nobody can...
People belittle or ignore or even rebel against God, because they view the processes of nature as having self-sufficient causes, normally regarded by them as ultimate. They do not realize that the universe is a sign pointing to something "beyond" its...
I knew you read the in the vac," he said in a low voice. Maurice felt uneasy. "Then you understand - without me saying more - " "How do you mean?" Durham could not wait. People were all around them, but with eyes that had gone intensely blue he whisp...
The way I see it people don't do what they want to do often enough. They just do some alternative which they'd kind of like to do, which isn't the same thing at all, and as a result that thing isn't enough and they end up depressed and annoyed with e...
Some contemporary mediums dislike the term 'psychic' because they feel it carries a negative connotation, leading people to associations with crystal balls, tea-leaf reading, fortune-telling, or other stereotypes.
The books transported her into new worlds and introduced her to amazing people who lived exciting lives. She went on olden-day sailing ships with Joseph Conrad. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and to India with Rudyard Kipling. She travelled...
People who live with OCD drag a metal sea anchor around. Obsession is a break, a source of drag, not a badge of creativity, a mark of genius or an inconvenient side effect of some greater function.
to Vaneigem and the Situationists who by shrewd use of collage and juxtaposition exposed both the poverty and richness of slogans, and the thinly veiled hypocrisy of a "spectacular" society which by not respecting words abuses people, and by insultin...
For all the pain I saw at Paterson, it is nothing compared to the pain that people inflict upon each other in the real world. All I can think of now is that it is not right for me to be unaware of that pain, including the pain that I inflict on other...
He taught me to fight, to defend myself, to stand up for what I believe in, and protect people I love. I thanked him for that lesson after that weekend in New Orleans when some guy put his hands on Delia, and I had to tear him apart.
