Practice giving things away, not just things you don't care about, but things you do like. Remember, it is not the size of a gift, it is its quality and the amount of mental attachment you overcome that count. So don't bankrupt yourself on a momentar...
I was interested when Mr. Morton talked in this manner, giving his thoughts on the way of the world. I knew that most men of his generation fumed at what they considered lack of propriety and dangerous freedom of modern young women, but Mr. Morton wa...
Do you think the Goblin King really did it?" asked Cordelia hesitantly. All the sheep knew she was talking about George's death. Mopple quickly pulled up a tuft of grass. "Or Satan?" added Lane. "Nonsense," Rameses snorted nervously. "Satan would nev...
Look," I said, "We knew Jason and Becky would be back, the break would end. This isn't a surprise, it's what's supposed to happen. It's what we wanted. Right?" "Is it?" he asked. "Is it what you want?" Whether he intended it to be or not, this was th...
Almost everything about Afghanistan was troubling Mullen. As Obama was giving intense focus on the war, Mullen was feeling more personal responsibility. Afghanistan had been marked by 'incredible neglect,' he told some of his officers. 'It's almost l...
See if you can catch yourself complaining, in either speech or thought, about a situation you find yourself in, what other people do or say, your surroundings, your life situation, even the weather. To complain is always nonacceptance of what is. It ...
In those pamphlets that they give at mental health centers where they list the ten or so symptoms that would indicate a clinical depression, 'suicide threats' or even simple 'talk of suicide' is considered cause for concern. I guess the point is that...
One of the most astounding dynamics in human relationships is how the unconscious intuition of our brain's right hemisphere is able to act as radar to find us just the right person to provoke and recreate our childhood attachment relationship ...I've...
There's blood pounding through the Duke's head. Knighthood is glory, he's thinking, not just grace in the saddle and at swordplay, but courage enough to give your life to defend what you hold dear. A noble reward, for noble men. A badge of honour. He...
We have no idea, now, of who or what the inhabitants of our future might be. In that sense, we have no future. Not in the sense that our grandparents had a future, or thought they did. Fully imagined cultural futures were the luxury of another day, o...
And a man said, speak to us of self-knowledge. and he answered, saying: Your hearts know in silence the secrets of the days and the nights. But your ears thirst for the sound of your heart's knowledge. You would know in words that which you have alwa...
The properties of mind are not purely mental: They are shaped in crucial ways by the body and brain and how the body can function in everyday life. The embodied mind is thus very much of this world. Our flesh is inseparable from what Merleau-Ponty ca...
All along — not only since she left, but for a decade before — I had been imagining her without listening, without knowing that she made as a poor a window as I did. And so I could not imagine her as a person who could feel fear, who could feel i...
Isabel Valverde was coming home. The brief, terrible letter from her brother had brought her across five thousand miles of ocean, from the New World to the Old, and during the long voyage she thought she had prepared herself for the worst. But now th...
Think of the long trip home. Should we have stayed at home and thought of here? Where should we be today? Is it right to be watching strangers in a play in this strangest of theatres? What childishness is it that while there's a breath of life in our...
She was exquisite. She tasted, smelled, and felt right in every way to him, but as they collapsed into bed, sated and finally ready to sleep, it was the shy girl who had entered his arms. It was she who caressed his cheek while kissing him deeply and...
Weird? Absurd? That’s how it seemed to me. I had these forces, these compunctions, these alternative personalities inside me, driving me. It was like being a jack-in-the-box and I was unsure which personality was going to jump out next: Billy, who ...
She thought men were saviors... ...And she looked for more in them than what they were... Only to rescue herself from those she wished would rescue her... And isn't that the most tragic lie... The lie where we tell what we wished were true and believ...
To put it in a rather vulgar way, I had been dreaming about love in the firm belief that I could not be loved, but at the final stage I had substituted desire for love and felt a sort of relief. But in the end I had understood that desire itself dema...
Have you ever had somebody grip you with a passion you never thought existed outside the fucking movies? As though they found you the most precious thing in the world? I felt it then, and couldn't believe that somebody would actually want me that muc...
Now she realized that she was not peering at a so-dark-blue-it-looked-black ocean, but rather she was looking straight through miles of incredibly clear water at something enormous and black in its nethermost depths. Maybe it was the bottom--so deep ...
