The worst of such stories is that the triumphant romancers can always be put to confusion and crushed by the very details in which real life is so rich and which these unhappy and involuntary story-tellers neglect as insignificant trifles. Oh, they h...
Jesus doesn't come asking if He can hang out with us. He commands us to follow Him. He has total authority and will settle for nothing less; He won't settle for being an accessory, an add- on, or a peaceful accompaniment to a nice life. No, He will r...
Each of us ought to be so happy that Jesus found us and saved us, that we are running to find the next person who needs to be introduced to Him. That's what church is, a community of rescued people celebrating grace, eager to spread the good news of ...
Listening to Ella furiously and endlessly unfurl the yarns of the Mingus tales, I understood that the need to tell stories is deeply embedded in our minds, and inseparably entangled with the mechanisms that generate and absorb language. Narrative ima...
Though now we think of fairy tales as stories intended for very young children, this is a relatively modern idea. In the oral tradition, magical stories were enjoyed by listeners young and old alike, while literary fairy tales (including most of the ...
We all have an inner voice, our personal whisper from the universe. All we have to do is listen -- feel and sense it with an open heart. Sometimes it whispers of intuition or precognition. Other times, it whispers an awareness, a remembrance from ano...
JAY: Why is a story more upfront than life? LENORE: It just seems more honest, somehow. JAY: Honest meaning closer to the truth? LENORE: I smell trap. JAY: I smell breakthrough. The truth is that there's no difference between a life and a story? But ...
Very well then! I'll write, write write. He let the words soak into his mind and displace all else. A man had a choice, after all. He devoted his life to his work or to his wife and children and home. It could not be combined; not in this day and age...
It was a fairy tale, no fooling. It was unreality becoming real. This frightened her. Because people don't care for unreality becoming real. It pricks their well-fed minds, you see, with something like a hunger pang. They prefer the logical stuffines...
Yet, despite all, it is a difficult thing to admit the existence of ghosts in a coldly factual world. One's very instincts rebel at the admission of such maddening possibility. For, once the initial step is made into the supernatural, there is no tur...
You can use your means in a good and bad way. In German-speaking art, we had such a bad experience with the Third Reich, when stories and images were used to tell lies. After the war, literature was careful not to do the same, which is why writers be...
I was running and deliberately lost my way. The world far off and nothing but my breath and the very next step and it’s like hypnosis. The feeling of conquering my own aliveness with no task but to keep going, making every way the right away and th...
One describes a tale best by telling the tale. You see? The way one describes a story, to oneself or to the world, is by telling the story. It is a balancing act and it is a dream. The more accurate the map, the more it resembles the territory. The m...
To erase the possibility of empathy is to erase the possibility of understanding. To erase the possibility of empathy is also to erase the possibility of art. Theater, fiction, horror stories, love stories. This is what art does. Good or bad, it imag...
Heaven is closer and more real than anything we experience in this life. And ultimately, I think that's why I've seen these glimpses---I'm always on the lookout for them. I believe if you look closely, you can clearly experience them too.
It is my own personal opinion that for someone to state that an autistic person 'lacks empathy' is to declare ignorance of the reality of autism.
If a woman is given only a limited amount of time to spend with the man she loves, she endures the separation by constantly recalling and reliving every moment down to the finest detail.
Scripture trains us to listen to and learn from stories of all kinds, inside the sacred text and outside, and to discern patterns and meanings within them. Stories of all sorts form and shape the character of those who read them. We live within the n...
Until the August 1 story about the Dahlberg check, the working relationship between Bernstein and Woodward was more competitive than anything else. Each had worried that the other might walk off with the remainder of the story by himself. If one had ...
The stories themselves aren't what moves him now...What moves him are the shadowy people behind the stories, the workers weary from their days, gathering at night in front of a comforting bit of fire...The world then was no less terrifying than it is...
Since that day there is nothing anyone could ever say to convince me that one person cannot change a nation. One person can do unbelievable things. All it takes is that one person who's willing to risk everything to make it happen.
