Prayer is based on the remote possibility that someone is actually listening; but so is a lot of conversation. If the former seems far-fetcher, consider the latter: even if someone is listening to your story, and really hearing, that person will disa...
If we had met five years ago, you wouldn't have found a more staunch defender of the newspaper industry than me ... I was winning awards, getting raises, lecturing college classes, appearing on TV shows, and judging journalism contests. So how could ...
My fingers combed through my dark hair, short and straight, landing in choppy, uneven ends nearly level with my chin. The color reminded me of every evil character in any fairytale. It seemed all were characteristically black; black hair, black eyes,...
Lay your life down. Your heartbeats cannot be hoarded. Your reservoir of breaths is draining away. You have hands, blister them while you can. You have bones, make them strain-they can carry nothing in the grave. You have lungs, let them spill with l...
In its quest to discover how the patterns of reality are organised, the story of modern science hints at a picture of a set of Chinese puzzle boxes, each one more intricately structured and wondrous than the last. Every time the final box appears to ...
My father,' I replied, 'I am fond of action. I like to succour the afflicted, and make people happy. Command that there be built for me a tower, from whose top I can see the whole earth, and thus discover the places where my help would be of most ava...
You can overcome the things that are done to you, but you cannot escape the things that you have done. Here is the truth: It matters, what you do at war. It matters more than you ever want to know. Because countries, like people, have collective cons...
Augustus Waters was the Mayor of the Secret City of Cancervania, and he is not replaceable", Isaac began. "Other people will be able to tell you funny stories about Gus, because he was a funny guy, but let me tell you a serious one: A day after I got...
The first generation of therapists doing this work were told by their clients that the one massive cult was everywhere, knew everything, had access to state-of-the-art technology, and was willing to kill both clients and therapists to stop the inform...
Love not often, but forever. It's one of my mother's sayings, and all my life it has been the story of my heart.... Love for my mother; love for my friends; the dark and complex love of a woman for a man. But when Fleur was born, everything changed. ...
I had a cup of tea, thought about my day and mostly about the horse whom, though I'd only known him a short time, I called my friend. I have few friends and am glad to have a horse for a friend. After the meal I smoked a cigarette and mused on the lu...
The themes of Jesus' teaching are important, but of course he was more than a teacher. All the Gospels put the end of his life at the dramatic center of his story. Here all the hopes of Israel come together—he is the king of the Jews, the greatest ...
I believe that through awareness and empowerment of children...one day we can end bullying. The problem with bullying is that is has been here since the beginning of time (Cain and Abel was a story of bullying that went bad.) Bullying has been part o...
We do not have to spend money and go hungry and struggle and study to become sensual; we always were. We need not believe we must somehow earn good erotic care; we always deserved it. Femaleness and its sexuality are beautiful. Women have long secret...
Shawshank’s good,” he says. “But you can’t beat the way Woody Harrelson kills zombies. He takes such joy in it.” “Uh-huh,” I say, making a face. “I’ve always found zombies to be the least threatening of the scary monsters. I mean, c...
Did you really think you could quit?" He moved closer, his steps slow, purposeful. "Just fax me a damned piece of paper and I‘d be forced to let you walk away from me?" "You don‘t have a choice." Lydia swallowed the lump in her throat and moved a...
In stories, when someone behaves uncharacteristically, we take it as a meaningful, even pivotal moment. If we are surprised again and again, we have to keep changing our minds, or give up and disbelieve the writer. In real life, if people think they ...
These days every morning begins like a joke you think you have heard before, but there is no one telling it whom you can stop. One day it's about a cow who walks into a bar, then about a man with a big nose on his honeymoon, then about a kangaroo who...
To be strong and true had been the most important task he had set himself since early childhood. Once, as a boy, he had tried to outstare the sun. But before he could tell whether he had really looked at it or not, changes had occurred: the blazing r...
It is a fact of life that oversimplified accounts of the development of science are often necessary in its teaching. Most scientific progress is a messy, complex and slow process; only with the hindsight of an overall understanding of a phenomenon ca...
I used to think I knew everything. I was a "smart person" who "got things done," and because of that, the higher I climbed, the more I could look down and scoff at what seemed silly or simple, even religion. But I realized something as I drove home t...
