I think because I did become a well-known face in my thirties and not in my twenties, I was pretty settled in my boots and I knew who I was. And I think there's a sort of Scottish thing, too, where you don't take yourself too seriously, and you don't...
I'm all over the place, up and down, scattered, withdrawing, trying to find some elusive sense of serenity." The world can't give that serenity. The world can't give us peace. We can only find it in our hearts." I hate that." I know. But the good new...
I don't like confrontational politics. But I like to be able to look at something like the oceans and go: 'Here's what the science is'. I don't feel like I am trying to say that I am right and you are wrong, I am just trying to say this does not make...
I remember writing 'The One I Can't Have' at the kitchen table. I was looking at a picture of Truman Capote with Marilyn Monroe and that's where I started. It doesn't make any sense because he was gay, but it was just the idea of the short guy and th...
The brain is full of lonely ideas, begging you to make some sense of them, to recognize them as interesting. The lazy brain just files them away in old pigeonholes, like a bureaucrat who wants an easy life. The lively brain picks and chooses and crea...
Uh, listen here mister. We got no way understandin’ this world. We got about as much sense of it as bird flyin’ in the sky. There’s a lot that bird don't know, though it don’t change the fact the world is happenin’ to him all the same. What...
Outside our consciousness there lies the cold and alien world of actual things. Between the two stretches the narrow borderland of the senses. No communication between the two worlds is possible excepting across the narrow strip. For a proper underst...
You know what’s really, powerfully sexy? A sense of humor. A taste for adventure. A healthy glow. Hips to grab on to. Openness. Confidence. Humility. Appetite. Intuition. … Smart-ass comebacks. Presence. A quick wit. Dirty jokes told by an innoce...
Sport, properly directed, develops character, makes a person courageous, a generous loser, and a gracious victor; it refines the senses, gives intellectual penetration, and steels the will to endurance. It is not merely a physical development then. S...
But that’s the wonderful thing about foreign travel, suddenly you are five years old again. You can’t read anything, you have only the most basic sense of how things work, you can’t even reliably cross the street without endangering your life. ...
Especially for upwardly mobile young females, declaring one's enthusiasm for Austen (whose heroines almost always move up in social and economic status as a result of the sterling marital alliances they form) has been a classic means of indicating on...
I don't think I am that tough, actually. Well, tough in the sense that I don't take any rubbish, and that doesn't make me very popular, frankly. I mean, because some people say something to me, and I just tell them off. I mean, why should I put up wi...
At every stage, the world that breaks in through our senses struggles to find a footing in our brains. We might liken memories to the messages recorded on tape, but we mistake the message for the medium, or the other way round, for memory is the tape...
Being a victim is supposed to set you free; it acquits you of any agency, any sense of responsibility to the person who did you harm. , they say. , they say. Nobody ever tells you what to do if leaving isn't an option. They just call you stupid. A du...
Simon!” The voice was Clary’s. He would know it anywhere. He wondered if his mind was conjuring it up now, a sense memory of what he’d most loved during life to carry him through the process of death. “Simon, you stupid idiot! I’m over here...
By becoming aware of God’s Spirit, by slowing down and paying attention to the tastes and sounds and smells of the food we make and eat, we infuse our meals—and by extension our hearts—with a sense of awe, a depth of prayer that cannot help but...
Is this spirited man the cook?" she shouted. "Are you responsible for this delightful feast? What a piece of luck! … What is it you say, Mr. Apples?" "Like shittin' with the pope." "No, the other thing, less vulgar." "Whistlin' donkey." "Quite! A s...
Many of us suffer because we think that if people don’t really love us, then we will have to live forever without love. But it’s not true. The greatest sense of love, which is available for us at all times, is God’s love.
The darker side of the City tried to emphasize the selfish parts of me by encouraging my sense of entitlement and my desire for personal space. But God seemed to whisper that the alternative existed: to let Him grow humility and concern for others in...
This was the winter of 2008/9. Work was ongoing to reinstate a tram system in the city. A lot of people couldn’t see the point of trams and many more disliked the disruption. Streets were closed off. There was almost a sense of ‘apartheid’ as t...
It gave her a sudden sense that it was now her turn to grow old, to find the world changing, sliding away from the old ways of being and behaving, so that you were gradually a stranger to the place you lived in. The woman priest with jogging clothes ...
