I often find that people confuse inner peace with some sense of insensibility whenever something goes wrong. In such cases inner peace is a permit for destruction: The unyielding optimist will pretend that the forest is not burning either because he ...
Art in order to move you has to be political or sexual - whether it is on canvas, in the drum of the cello, in the words of the poet. If it doesn't move you, what is the point? And if it does move you, what is the point? The point is to touch your se...
For God to prove himself on demand, physically, would be a grave disappointment, and the strongest Christians should be considerably grateful that he chooses not to do so. The skeptic endlessly demands proof, yet God refuses to insult the true intell...
To reach only for that which pleasantly enchants you is the least of imagination, if even imagination at all, by the obvious reality of remaining within your means. The greater of imagination is parallel to risk. It extends beyond your comfort zone o...
On the one hand the younger son realizes that he has lost the dignity of his sonship, but at the same time that sense of lost dignity makes him also aware that he is indeed the son who had dignity to lose," (pp. 49).
...your mind was seizing on something to try to make sense of the emotion... Can you see the power emotion has to distort our outlook? Makes you wonder, did you have a bad day, or did you make it a bad day?
The attentions of others matter to us because we are afflicted by a congenital uncertainty as to our own value, as a result of which affliction we tend to allow others' appraisals to play a determining role in how we see ourselves. Our sense of ident...
Jasmine believes in a prophecy that says she is destined to love a man named Josh Toby. Okay, fine. He could believe that. Hell, he had friends who believed carbohydrates were the work of the devil. True love made sense at least.
It was the United States of America in the cold late spring of 1967, and the market was steady and the G.N.P. high and a great many articulate people seemed to have a sense of high social purpose and it might have been a spring of brave hopes and nat...
I don't really like driving in the snow. There's something about the motion of the falling snowflakes that hurts my eyes, throws my sense of balance all to hell. It's like tumbling into a field of stars.
May you find the strength and resolve today, to allow a deeper sense of healing to begin.
Until she went with him to India the first time after they were married. Then it all made sense, and she realized that the hospitality he displayed to all guests was larger than he was - it was cultural, hereditary, something coded into his DNA.
I'm the one who will always watch over you. Always be there to fuck you back to your senses when you need it, the one who will never let you die. I pull my shirt over my head and kick off my shoes. "What more could a woman ask?
He was no lover in a worldly sense; the only love he knew was that of divine understanding, of taking a whole life into its depths as if they were his own. From this, the greatest pain, the greatest happiness is born: the hope that we too will one da...
Nothing happens without God’s will, and life doesn’t always go according to plan. Man proposes, God disposes. And it is God’s will that we need to surrender to. In retrospect it usually all makes sense.
I know when my life is over my writings will live on, perhaps in a story or maybe a sweet love song. You see, I do not write for glory or to get anything for free. I just sit down and I write, because it makes so much sense to me.
Not every conflict is necessarily neurotic; some amount of conflict is normal and healthy. In a similar sense suffering is not always a pathological phenomenon; rather than being a symptom of neurosis, suffering may well be a human achievement, espec...
Every trace of the passionate plumage of the cloudy sunset had been swept away, and a naked moon stood in a naked sky. The moon was so strong and full, that (by a paradox often to be noticed) it seemed like a weaker sun. It gave, not the sense of bri...
It was somehow clear, even then, that the monster had been lonely. The folds above its eye made the old face look wistful, and it emanated such a strong sense of solitude that each human standing in the park that day felt miles from the others, thoug...
She sensed her own power to enslave him. He would come willingly enough. No filthy atheistic beliefs she held were strong enough to douse what was crackling in the brief space between them. It would satisfy her on a hundred levels, to bring him to hi...
Lawrence's claims for the vital self and his inability to make it convincing independently of Freudian psychology are serious flaws in the novel, explain the sense in which the author's vision exceeds his grasp, and bring the cleavage between intenti...
