Someday you'll understand. You'll have your own children, and they'll mean more to you than the world. A wife has to defend her children, even against her own husband. Not that I expect you to be easily cowed. But sometimes, despite all you say and d...
Sleeping is terrifying. When you close your eyes and surrender your consciousness to the void, you lose yourself—voluntarily—and you're trustingly assuming you'll find yourself back out of the labyrinth again. Usually you do. But sometimes you do...
A person is loved for the risk he or she takes for someone else, be it a mother, a father, a child, a lover, or a friend. It takes courage to reach out and connect with another human being. It requires risk and hard work. It takes courage and compass...
Emily’s world fascinates and disturbs: in it you can touch thick Yorkshire speech, and moorland rain slants across your mind with a smell of mossy limestone and yet you are not at home, you might almost be in Gondal or Angria except the towers and ...
Sometimes, looking at the many books I have at home, I feel I shall die before I come to the end of them, yet I cannot resist the temptation of buying new books. Whenever I walk into a bookstore and find a book on one of my hobbies — for example, O...
Sometimes I wonder if we ever truly let anyone completely in. The desire for another human being to know you, all of you, all the pieces, even the ones you’re ashamed of — is huge. But too often, we sit down and sort through the pieces only picki...
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...
For Americans, Acts 16:9 is the high-fructose corn syrup of Bible verses--an all-purpose ingredient we'll stir into everything from the ink on the Marshall Plan to canisters of Agent Orange. Our greatest goodness and our worst impulses come out of th...
Sometimes events that lead us bereft of anything but grief just happen for no reason other than happenstance--a car turns left instead of right, a train is missed, a call comes too late--and the real test of our humanness is whether, in light of that...
You have a light in you that’s almost blinding. But in me there’s only darkness. Sometimes I think it’s like the darkness that infected you that night in the inn when you began to cry and to tremble. You were so helpless, so unprepared for it. ...
Sometimes you imagine that everything could have been different for you, that if only you had gone right one day when you chose to go left, you would be living a life you could never have anticipated. But at other times you think there was no other w...
Van Gogh: "It is precisely in learning to suffer without complaining,29 learning to consider pain without repugnance, that one risks vertigo a little; and yet it might be possible, yet one glimpses even a vague probability that on the other side of l...
I decided to write this piece because my internal critic told me to write it. At least I think he told me to write it. You see, he only speaks French, and I don't speak any French, so sometimes there can be a lot of confusion. In fact, all I really k...
You know sometimes when I walk into your room with a flashlight or a candle?' I nodded. 'Well, love is like that. Light doesn't have to announce it's way into a room or ask the darkness to leave. It just is. It walks ahead of you, and the darkness ro...
There were no judgments to be made, yet out of necessity one had to select. Beyond good and evil was all right in theory, but to go on living one had to select: some were kinder than others, some were simply more interested in you, and sometimes the ...
Once your words fly out of your mouth, you sometimes can't control whether they fly straight or crooked, Grandma Augustine says. "They can get bent in the strangest ways." Grandma Augustine says that the only way to straighten out bad words is to kee...
There are a lot of times the heart burrows deeper, goes tunnelling into itself for reasons only the heart itself seems to know.They are times of isolation, of hibernation, sometimes of desolation. There is a bareness that spreads out over the interio...
Sometimes the greatest thing we can ask ourselves is “Why not me?” Anyone who has ever accomplished anything worth while has either verbalized or internalized this question. The beauty of the answer is that it completely depends on us. We are all...
If we go looking for a friend, we’ll find many locked doors. It can be a lonely and often fruitless search. Sometimes it feels like no matter how hard we knock there’s not a single person to be found for true friendship. But... when we go out to ...
Sometimes a loved one might not 'spit' the message in the most tender or poetic fashion that suits you, but don't allow a rugged style to blind you from a loving intent. It's the spirit of the message one must receive beyond [the] perception of one's...
Most of us, I believe, admire strength. It's something we tend to respect in others, desire for ourselves, and wish for our children. Sometimes, though, I wonder if we confuse strength with other words—like 'aggression' and even 'violence'. Real st...
