Many people would have to hang by their teeth from a frayed cord suspended by a paper clip from a leaking hot air balloon over the Grand Canyon in order to feel what I feel standing on the third step of a stepladder trying to put millet in the bird f...
...some men say get them crying on your shoulder and you have the sheets half-unfurled already. Other fellows say get them laughing. I say get them drunk. I ordered up more Riesling...
Law is not as disinterested as our concepts of law pretend; law serves power; law in large measure is a recapitulation of the status quo; it confirms a rigid order designed to insulate the beneficiaries of the status quo from the disturbances of chan...
Perhaps we are like cells in the mind of God, contributing to celestial functions beyond our ken, just as our cells unknowingly fashion our thoughts and actions. Perhaps the laws of nature order and constrain even the living and eternal Deity from wh...
Don't you understand that we need to be childish in order to understand? Only a child sees things with perfect clarity, because it hasn't developed all those filters which prevent us from seeing things that we don't expect to see.
The great problems we see in the world today will not be solved by people functioning at half capacity cranking out work they don't care about in order to buy more things that will eventually rust and rot.
The boys were going to a place that none had ever been before, to serve an order that had been the enemy of their kith and kin for thousands of years, yet Jon saw no tears, heard no wailing mothers. These are winter's people, [...] tears freeze upon ...
Who, if I cried, would hear me among the angelic orders? And even if one of them suddenly pressed me against his heart, I should fade in the strength of his stronger existence. For beauty's nothing but the beginning of terror we're still just able to...
The army is the only order of men sufficiently united to concur in the same sentiments, and powerful enough to impose them on the rest of their fellow-citizens; but the temper of soldiers, habituated at once to violence and to slavery, renders them v...
Beckendorf, whose legs were now working fine (nothing like being chased by a huge monster to get your body back in order) shook his head and gasped for breath. “You shouldn’t have turned it on! It’s unstable! After a few years, automatons go wi...
Everything that seemingly happens externally is occurring in order to trigger something within us, to expand us and take us back to who we truly are.
Rarely did events play out as imagined, in any case. The order of future events was transient. In the same way that the past was reconfigured by selective memory, future events, too, were moving targets. One could only act on instinct, grab hold of a...
In any case where someone is hurt within himself because of a mere jealousy over your success expedition, that is none of your business.You don’t bring yourself low in order to please those who envy you.
Make good choices in order to manifest your true identity; manifest your true being. What others see in you now is just a mild photo of you. The wild copy is yet to come. Print that image; make it bigger!
The first handkerchief was tied to a second, yellow handkerchief. He fed both through the window and kept pulling. Attached to it was a red one. Then a green one. “Go away, you goddamn clown!” Jenny ordered. But Benny the Clown continued to pull ...
Child abuse is still sanctioned — indeed, held in high regard — in our society as long as it is defined as child-rearing. It is a tragic fact that parents beat their children in order to escape the emotions from how they were treated by their own...
He [Mihaly Babits] hoped that some god might offer a bed to the river of words which rose to his lips, so that it might flow between ordered banks to the sea, there to vanish.
You speak good words, child, but sometimes what lies within is much darker. The line between justice and revenge is then. Justice is order; revenge is chaos. If revenge is your innermost desire, you will be destroyed upon entering into the hall
One can never read too little of bad, or too much of good books: bad books are intellectual poison; they destroy the mind. In order to read what is good one must make it a condition never to read what is bad; for life is short, and both time and stre...
Perhaps it’s impossible to wear an identity without becoming what you pretend to be. She thought of that, worried about it for a few days, and then wrote a column using that as a premise, to show that politicians who toadied to the Russians in orde...
It would be very nice if there were a God who created the world and was a benevolent providence, and if there were a moral order in the universe and an after-life; but it is a very striking fact that all this is exactly as we are bound to wish it to ...