Readers have the right to say whatever the fuck they want about a book. Period. They have that right. If they hate the book because the MC says the word “delicious” and the reader believes it’s the Devil’s word and only evil people use it, th...
My teacher's mind and my interest in youth has brought me to some renewed conclusions, and I pass them on earnestly to mature persons who are given to assisting young people off the trail. The dictionary has a word for them: iconoclast. It is defined...
In that six months, so much happened that death seemed, primarily, inconvenient. The trial period was extended. I seem to keep extending it. There are many things to do. There are books to write and naps to take. There are movies to see and scrambled...
Majority of people on both sides want peace, but each side does not believe that the other side wants also the same, since there is no contact, no knowledge, and no trust. Mechanism for overcoming psychological barriers and progressing towards a solu...
Then there were long, lazy summer afternoons when there was nothing to do but read. And dream. And watch the town go by to supper. I think that is why our great men and women so often have sprung from small towns, or villages. They have had time to d...
Anachronism is not the inconsequential juxtaposition of epochs, but rather their inter-penetration, like the telescoping legs of a tripod, a series of tapering structures. Since it's quite far from one end to the other they can be opened out like an ...
I believe in the magic of books. I believe that during certain periods in our lives we are drawn to particular books--whether it's strolling down the aisles of a bookshop with no idea whatsoever of what it is that we want to read and suddenly finding...
I fought angrily against seeing particular types of poetic organization because it seemed awful to see my own life and these actual events in that way. But when you put forth an intention into the universe to speak a certain truth and narrate a certa...
sufferers of depression, who can elect to keep their feelings private, experience chronic, unremitting emotional alienation. Each moment spent “passing” as normal deepens the sense of disconnection generated by depression in the first instance. I...
Good sociologists have always had an insatiable curiosity about about even the trivialities of human behaviour, and if this curiosity leads a sociologist to devote many years to the painstaking exploration of some small corner of the social world tha...
If we focus our efforts on doing, we will always fall short of our real potential. We can do all the right things, but if we do not do them for the right reasons, they will never have the power to change our internal view of life.
Your religion assumes that people are children and need a boogeyman so they'll behave. You want people to believe in God so they'll obey the law. That's the only means that occurs to you: a strict secular police force, and the threat of punishment by...
A Very Short Song Once, when I was young and true, Someone left me sad- Broke my brittle heart in two; And that is very bad. Love is for unlucky folk, Love is but a curse. Once there was a heart I broke; And that, I think, is worse.
For me the noise of Time is not sad: I love bells, clocks, watches — and I recall that at first photographic implements were related to techniques of cabinetmaking and the machinery of precision: cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing, and perha...
Let the Lord your God be your hope – seek for nothing else from him, but let him himself be your hope. There are people who hope from him riches or perishable and transitory honours, in short they hope to get from God things which are not God himse...
But I don't think any parent can expect to escape this life without disappointing his child at some point. And the same could be said the other way around. We all of us fall short now and again, and disappoint someone dear to us, or ourselves. Thankf...
A boy is a man in miniature, and though he may sometimes exhibit notable virtue, as well as characteristics that seem to be charming because they are childlike, he is also a schemer, self-seeker, traitor, Judas, crook, and villain - in short, a man.
As the carriage bumped her bones along the dark country lanes, Martha decided that if she ever got back to her own time she would write a book called 'Travel in the Edwardian Era. It would be a short book - OUCH in capital letters followed by fifty p...
I sat and three hours later realized I had been seized by an idea that started short but grew to wild size by day's end. The concept was so riveting I found it hard at sunset to flee the library basement and take the bus home to reality: my house, my...
And more than the quality of its institutions, what distinguishes a developed country from a developing one is the degree of consensus in its politics, and thus its ability to take actions to secure a better future despite short-term pain.
It is the life-affirming genius of baseball that the short can pummel the tall, the rotund can make fools of the sleek, and no matter how far down you find yourself in the bottom of the ninth you can always pull out a miracle.
