I'm starting to believe that happily ever after includes people doing things that upset each other. We all get cranky, or impatient, or worried, or careless enough to do or say things that hurt someone else. Like it or not, that's normal. We can't bl...
Congratulations. You have met your conscience. In my experience, the world is divided between those who have one and those who don't. And the ones with one are divided into those who will act on their conscience and those who won't. Those who will ar...
You need to play to your strengths as a couple. Sharing is really awesome when you're messing around with Play-Doh in kindergarten. It's less awesome when you're adults and one of you is good at something and the other person sucks at it. So just let...
Attention can be trained very naturally, with affection, just as you train a puppy. When something distracts your attention, you say “Come back” and bring it back again. With a lot of training, you can teach your mind to come running back to you ...
There should have been a dark whisper in the wind. Or maybe a deep chill in the bone. Something. An ethereal song only Elizabeth or I could hear. A tightness in the air. Some textbook premonition. There are misfortunes we almost expect in life—what...
In order to take control of our lives and accomplish something of lasting value, sooner or later we need to learn to believe. We don't need to shift our responsibilities onto the shoulders of some deified spiritual superman or sit around and wait for...
It wasn't chance at all, Gilly. People are yearning creatures. They imagine and strive and hope. Stories about an enchanted band of vagabonds existed before the Carnival itself. But those fairy tales become the focal point of billions of daydreams, a...
Sales is a solo endeavor, a cold and lonely venture. Or it can be viewed in that aloof manner. It can also be viewed as something warm and symbiotic, and I think that’s what all the best salespeople have in common. They all choose to look at sales ...
Shhh.” He put a finger to her lips. “Hear me out. I cannot deny that I would've liked to have made babies with you. A little girl with your hair and eyes would've been the delight of my life. But it is you that I want primarily, not mythical chil...
I am human. Like all humans, I do not remember my birth. By the time we wake up to ourselves, we are little children, and our advent is something that happened an eternity ago, at the beginning of time. We live like latecomers to the theater; we must...
There is a fragrance in the air, a certain passage of a song, an old photograph falling out from the pages of a book, the sound of somebody's voice in the hall that makes your heart leap and fills your eyes with tears. Who can say when or how it will...
The claim to know that no god exists is just irrational. The non-existence of any god has no evidence, let alone proof. To know something for certain there must be proof. To hold to a belief there must be evidence. Until then, the only actual reasona...
God was something I did not understand the way kids who went to church did. They said God was a man in the sky with white hair and a beard like Santa. This seemed strange to me. When I thought of God, I imagined only mist over the pond, a sliver of m...
I was shocked at the revelation of her vaulting ambition, her greed. I should have loathed her or, knowing what kind of a person she was, I should have realized the futility of any personal attachment, the impossibility of its maturing into something...
I love you. If you remember nothing else for the rest of your life, if you fall and hit your head and can’t remember my name, if you get so sick you’re unrecognizable, if you hate me, if you’re on your deathbed and can’t manage to even lift a...
If life was perfect,how in the hell would v evr learn to depend on someone other dn ourselves?If anything,dt’s wat life’s taught me.D need to b perfect is stemmed in d very belief dt it’s actually something v cn achieve.Self-actualization —do...
Sometimes by holding onto what you love the most — you end up choking the very life from the thing you want to keep on living. It’s possible to try too hard, to love something so deeply that you lose yourself. The danger is never in loving someon...
I had the feeling she was going to say something big. One of us had to say it. What happened to us? Where are we going? It was like this silence between us was frozen and we were both feeling our way around it. How is it that two people can need each...
When you stand inside somebody's library, you get a powerful sense of who they are, and not just who they are now but who they've been. . . . It's a wonderful thing to have in a house. It's something I worry is endangered by the rise of the e-book. W...
Actually, Bush, technically speaking, is not really President-because he refused to take the Oath of Office. I don’t know how many of you noticed this, but the wording of the Oath of Office is written in the Constitution, so you can’t fool around...
Well," said St. Clare, "suppose that something shoul bring down the price of cotton once and forever, and make the whole slave property a drug in the market, don't you think we should soon have another version of the Scripture doctrine? What flood of...
