Travel does this: it creates space that allows thoughts and memories to intrude and assert themselves with impunity. Smells and sights, the quality of light, the honk of a horn -- can all act as touchstones when least expected.
The balancing act we parents attempt is convincing our children: 1. You are loved more than you can imagine. 2. The world does not revolve around you.
I travel to be replenished with beauty, for travel makes the beauty of this world seem like a Christmas that never ends. I travel for the jolting, angelic act of seeking strangeness and newness and profoundness . . .
Sir, he hath not fed of the dainties that are bred in a book; He hath not eat paper, as it were; he hath not drunk ink; his intellect is not replenished; he is only an animal, only sensible in the duller parts... (Act IV, Scene II)
That's the problem with relationships," George was saying. "It's a contract. You agree to be some unchanging caricature of yourself. To act the same way all the time. Never to change. It's counter-evolutionary. How can anything new and good come into...
At five in the morning, some policemen, unannounced, entered the house of a man named Pardon, later a member of the section of the Barricade-Merry, and still later killed in the insurrection of April 1834, found him standing not far from his bed, wit...
How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act,...
Because as any writer will tell you, an IDEA for a book is like falling in love, it’s all wild emotion and headlong rush, but the ACTUAL ACT of writing a book is like building a relationship: it is joyous, slow, fragile, frustrating, exhilarating, ...
You can succeed and get what you want. You must want it and believe it with all the profusion of your heart and act with energy towards its realization
How often do we listen and act to the call of honesty, serenity, humility and generosity? How many "soft pillows" do we use for a life time? If only everyone uses a "soft pillow," then what a better world it could be to have many genuine hearts.
I can hear someone whispering, like a mother quieting her small child: shhh…shhh…shhh…a pregnant pause taking shape and growing between each whisper, bringing life to the next series of sounds. They last no more than a few seconds, these brief ...
Mothers see the angel in us because the angel is there. If it's shown to the mother, the son has got an angel to show, hasn't he? When a son cuts somebody's throat the mother only sees it's possible for a misguided angel to act like a devil - and she...
Why do you think Jesus used wine to symbolize his blood?... I think the Lord used wine for dozens of reasons, but one of the most convincing for me is the fact that crafting a glass of fine wine is nothing less than a very intentional, almost sacrifi...
When it comes to love, your point of view, your imagination and your energy can carry you through anything. As you love, it will spill over to everyone and everything you encounter and beyond. There is no force imaginable that is more powerful than t...
Because when you’re a 23-year old party girl who has to pee you don’t really think about the possibility that your nerdy bouncer friend might suddenly start acting like a trench-coated pedophile who flashes kids at the park.
The few times I said to myself anywhere: ‘Now that’s a nice spot for a permanent home,’ I would immediately hear in my mind the thunder of an avalanche carrying away the hundreds of far places which I would destroy by the very act of settling i...
There’s no glory in this whole shit. No war is ever glorious. Heroes are usually dead. Besides, they rarely turn into heroes because they are super-humans, but because of circumstances. Heroes rarely think. Heroes just act. So, all this is, is a st...
The more he identifies with the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own life and his own desires. The spectacle’s estrangement from the acting subject is expressed by the fact that the individual’s gestures are no longer his own;...
Religion has the capacity to silence critical thinking and create blindness in entire groups of people. It can infect the minds of followers so completely as to allow the most egregious sexual acts against children and others to go unchallenged for c...
It's a matter of dishonour, and when it gets out, which it's bound to, this will be the one act you'll be remembered for. Everything else you achieved will be irrelevant. Your reputation will rest only on this, because ultimately reality is social, i...
No one is willing to believe that adults too, like children, wander about this earth in a daze and, like children, do not know where they come from or where they are going, act as rarely as they do according to genuine motives, and are as thoroughly ...
