I inhaled the musty, leathery, old-papery scent and a shiver passed over me. If I had any idea of heaven, it was this: shelves and shelves of books, ten times as many as were upstairs, each with stories or pictures more exciting and beautiful than th...
I didn't feel sad or happy. I didn't feel proud or ashamed. I only felt that in spite of all the things I'd done wrong, in getting myself here, I'd done right.
Promising paradise or threatening hell-fire is, we assumed, generally admitted to be unproductive. It is based upon a fundamental fraud which, when discovered, turns the individual against society and nourishes the very thing it tries to stamp out. W...
That is the thing about life - it takes a million moving pieces for it to work right, and just one to mess everything up.�
Do you think things always have an explanation? "Yes. I believe that they do. But I think that with our human limitations we're not always able to understand the explanations. But you see, Meg, just because we don't understand doesn't mean that the e...
I loved him in that moment more than I thought possible, but it would end when this night did. We might chase the phantoms of these feelings for a while afterward, but in the end we’ll concede defeat and move on. Nothing is meant to last past its n...
However, in this technique, because your eyes are open and because the gaze in not a tight gaze and because the whole emphasis of the practice is one of openess, even though you're mindful of the out-breath, you're not shutting out all other things t...
Having realized that her affection for Sinclair went far beyond friendship, there was only one thing for her to do. She took off her hat and banged her head against the nearest lamppost. Also realizing she was drawing attention from passerby, she put...
...writing allows us to reposition ourselves so we can see what is otherwise in our mental blind spots or those things about oneself and the world that we neither can see nor understand from the spot where we stand.
When it happens to you, you will be surprised. That thing they say about how you knew all the time but just weren't facing it? That might be the case, but nevertheless, there you will be. You will feel like you have been kicked in the stomach, that y...
We can think only of creatures, of things He's made. Creatures are all we know, and can be all we know until we know Him. When we think of Him like that, we find we can't believe. He can't be like a creature any more than a carpenter is like a table.
In this story of the outside world and the inside world with a fire between, the outside world of little screwups recedes now for a few hours to be taken over by the inside world of blowups, this time by a colossal blowup but shaped by little screwup...
When you live with voices in your head, you are drawn inextricably to voices outside your head. Very often the voices work to confirm your worst suspicions. Or think of things you could never have imagined! There are only so many hours of the day to ...
I am convinced that every effort must be made in childhood to teach the young to use their own minds. For one thing is sure: If they don't make up their minds, someone will do it for them.
Think When did it go wrong? The break-in? No, before that. The party? That was part of it, but that wasn't when it started. Zack? Of course, yeah, it would be easy to say it was Zack. But that's not it, is it? Before Zack. Before Ryan. Before Max and...
I don't feel sorry for myself, Beck. Lots of people have shitty parents and roaches in the cabinets and stale, raw Pop-Tarts for dinner and a TV that barely works and a dad who doesn't care when his son doesn't come home during a national disaster. T...
The five points of , together with the five points of , remind us of the Ten Commandments of the Christtian and Jewish faiths, as well as of the ten virtues of Buddhism. In fact, there is no religion without these moral or ethical codes. All spiritua...
If you have done something meritorious, you experience pleasure and happiness; if wrong things, suffering. A happy or unhappy life is your own creation. Nobody else is responsible. If you remember this, you won’t find fault with anybody. You are yo...
Perhaps the most important thing I learned was about democracy, that democracy is not our government, our constitution, our legal structure. Too often they are enemies of democracy.
D stared out the window, shoving down the feeling that it might be real nice to sit here and tell Jack Francisco everything about himself, confess things he'd never told nobody, just to feel like somebody cared, and to keep those big blue eyes fixed ...
I turned on Fox News and jumped when I saw that they had one of those things in their studio. "Are you people crazy?" I screamed at the television. "Get out of there. Somebody shoot it!" Then I realized I was watching Special Report and had mistaken ...
