At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough. No record of it needs to be kept and you don't need someone to share it with or tell it to. When that happens — that let...
But then, life is a constant withering of possibilities. Some are stolen with the lives of people you love. Others are let go, with regret and reluctance and deep, deep sorrow. But there is compensation for lives unlived in the intoxicating joy of kn...
There is no neutral ground when it comes to the tolerance question. Everybody has a point of view she thinks is right, and everybody passes judgment at some point or another. The Christian gets pigeonholed as the judgmental one, but everyone else is ...
I told the waitress I wanted some coffee. She asked if I wanted leaded of unleaded, so I had to leave the restaurant, because I quit drinking gasoline years ago.
I could not have climbed any mountains while looking from the ground... I would not have flown... or dived... or surfed... or swum... I am not a tourist nor a spectator... this is the life I have left, and I will not waste it like some rubber-neck
All the while she wondered if any strange good thing might come of her being in her ancestral land; and some spirit within her rose automatically as the sap in the twigs. It was unexpected youth, surging up anew after its temporary check, and bringin...
The basements of the churches I've loved reveal the foundation of the spiritual life to be not belief so much as engagement with the mystery lurking at the base of all things. We build a framework on top of mystery because we need someplace to live, ...
SHUT UP. Both of you. You're coming with me." To me he said, "Put some pants on." "Fuck you. This is my house. I make the rules. You take your clothes . John, get the Twister mat.
The speaker was so boring that he put me to sleep. But he didn’t stop talking, so I had to wake up and tell him to keep his voice down, or stop talking altogether, while I was trying to take a nap. Geez. Some people can be so rude.
You are eating the sea, that's it, only the sensation of a gulp of sea water has been wafted out of it by some sorcery, and you are on the verge of remembering you don't know what, mermaids or the sudden smell of kelp on the ebb tide or a poem you re...
The way I remember it the tribe got paid some huge amount." "That's what they said to him. He said, What can you pay for the way a man lives? He said, What can you pay for the way a man is? They didn't understand.
The irony of what we define as a mistake can and will sometimes return to you as a redefined destiny that life sends your way without any of your own free will and choice in what happens. It just happens. Something in me changed in that one tell-tale...
Positive people on the other had are not those who deny what is going on around them for some pie-in-the-sky type of thinking. Positive people are very award of the problems, disasters and difficulties that are happening all around them. What they do...
Each year the winning team of the Super Bowl loses some ground (yardage) throughout the game. Yet they always keep their minds fixed on the goal, push through the opposition, and, as a result, advance to victory in the end.
(As Plato:) There is nothing superstitious about forcing bad consequences for the hubris of paternalistic utopianism. Humanity should never be frozen into a vision of the best. A creative society must be willing to tolerate some degree of instability...
You know,” Taniel said, “we could have kept firing after they sounded the retreat. Would have wiped out thousands on the mountainside. The Kez did that to us in Fatrasta a few times.” Gavril snorted angrily. “War has to have some decorum. Oth...
In no mood for one of her silly games, I snatched it off her and scanned the page. It turned out to be a list of names, all of them boys, and some of whom I recognised. And then I noticed the title: ‘Operation: Popping the Cherry’. I leaped to my...
Anyway—because we are readers, we don't have to wait for some communications executive to decide what we should think about next—and how we should think about it. We can fill our heads with anything from aardvarks to zucchinis—at any time of ni...
I still say Kellyanne could do with some real-live mates," went on my dad, as if he was talking to someone inside his beer. Mum had stomped off into the kitchen. "Maybe they are real!" she shouted back at him after rattling a few plates together. "Ev...
Don't try to justify yourself on the ground that somebody must do this kind of work. Let "somebody," not yourself, take the responsibility ... Many a man has dwarfed his manhood, cramped his intellect, crushed his aspiration, blunted his finer sensib...
Now and then, however, he is horribly thoughtless, and seems to take a real delight in giving me pain. Then I feel, Harry, that I have given away my whole soul to some one who treats it as if it were a flower to put in his coat, a bit of decoration t...
