Let there be a time in the future, I prayed, when he laughs with his children, and plays on the shore with them, and spends all his nights in loving arms. Let us have that. To whom I was praying I did not know. The future was in our own hands. If we ...
Most people think, when they're young, that they're going to the top of their chosen world, and that the climb up is only a formality. Without that faith, I suppose, they might never start. Somewhere on the way they lift their eyes to the summit and ...
Moses Never Closes was something folks counted on. It was a certain place in an uncertain world. Folks wanted it to stay the way it was, because once you change one part of a thing, all the other parts begin to shift, and pretty soon, you just don’...
It's peculiar to me,' she said, 'that everybody pays so much attention to living and so little to dying. Why are these high-powered scientists always screwing around trying to prolong life instead of finding pleasant ways to end it? There must be a h...
I'm a combative person, I know I am, and the greatest thing about law school was I learned to fight with my brain. I clarified something to myself. No matter how much you want to live in the white man's world, you either live by what you believe in, ...
I grew up with adults who believed the Virgin Mary was appearing in Medjugorje, Yugoslavia. They held prayer meetings where they closed their eyes and claimed to see visions, and we were prepped for the end of the world throughout grade school. So th...
When my sister and I were very young, my father used to tell us fairy stories that he'd made up. My mother was always telling him that he should write them down, but he would say, 'Well, they've all been done before. There are so many blooming books ...
I unconsciously decided that, even if it wasn't an ideal world, it should be so and painted only the ideal aspects of it - pictures in which there are no drunken slatterns or self-centered mothers . . . only foxy grandpas who played baseball with kid...
I could give up, it's the easiest option But what would I achieve? Many sleepless nights holding regret Of all I didn't seek, That option will never exist to me; My dreams are far too real, Down the hard road I find My place in the world; the closest...
its more a trance, jonah said. the whole world is pressing in on me, like a weight on my chest, slowly pushing me down ans down. and there's nothing between me and this weight but my flimsy skin. Its not enough. It won't protect me. It doesn't keep a...
Sometimes with the most intense pain a paralysis of sensibility occurs. The soul disintegrates--hence the deadly frost--the free power of the mind--the shattering, ceaseless wit of this kind of despair. There is no inclination for anything any more--...
No relationship can truly grow if you go on holding back. If you remain clever and go on safeguarding and protecting yourself, only personalities meet, and the essential centers remain alone. Then only your mask is related, not you. Whenever such a t...
Back here where I am, my heart bleeds in despair for I know that innocent lives are being killed in Gaza to sustain an agenda that serves only the oligarchs. Have no worries my dear fellow Muslims all around the world, the Almighty Allah sees all, an...
I prayed hard and only gradually became aware that this fierce praying was a way of finding prologue and entrance into my own writing. This came as both astonishment and relief. When I thought God had abandoned me, I discovered that He had simply giv...
Good writing should help us see the world in new ways, it should crack open our generosity towards each other. That's what I hope my work does anyway. I want someone to read it and know that they aren't alone in the universe. I want my words to act a...
Ralph Waldo Emerson once asked what we would do if the stars only came out once every thousand years. No one would sleep that night, of course. The world would create new religions overnight. We would be ecstatic, delirious, made rapturous by the glo...
There’s no escaping it,” he’d been fond of telling us when he was well, “the way you look defines who you are. You might argue for your soul, or your heart, but everyone else in the world will judge you on your big nose or your weak chin. Six...
When we are mired in the relative world, never lifting our gaze to the mystery, our life is stunted, incomplete; we are filled with yearning for that paradise that is lost when, as young children, we replace it with words and ideas and abstractions -...
Stem cells are being used for anti-aging, and the University of Miami is doing a study about that to prove that it is true. They are looking at me, and my markers have shown exactly that I have been actually reversing my aging and getting younger. I ...
Shakespeare's ambiguous lubricity in is less disturbing than the bleakly moral emphasis of , where virtue is so low-spirited, its exclamation so lachrymose and its justification the nasty realpolitik of Roman Republicanism. The sun has not dried the ...
I have always had a tendency to keep enlarging problems which I personally think is the way the world works... that seeing anything one dimensionally on the kinds of political, sort of big issues of human progress is going to be a distorted view of t...