His face was pale, and he dropped to the floor so that he was half kneeling, half sitting before her. "Please. I can...help you." "No." She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. Her mind felt clearer now. Everything made more sense when she wasn...
...‘All this suffering,’ I said, ‘and nothing but greed and violence to build on when the war is over.’ ‘Have another soda-mint,’ said Charles. I had one. Then I said, ‘Why are we here? That’s what I don’t understand. Why be here at...
I suppose hobbits need some description nowadays, since they have become rare and shy of the Big People, as they call us. They are (or were) a little people, about half our height, and smaller than the bearded Dwarves. Hobbits have no beards. There i...
No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so fo...
I knew who I was now. I had figured out how to love myself. And more and more each day, I was learning to be myself in the world. Life felt completely different, like I was sipping the perfection of a made-to-order drink that was exactly what I had i...
Boys", Buffy hissed through clenched teeth, "being quiet is an important part of sneaking." "Oh, sorry", Xander said, reducing his voice to a whisper. "Besides, ritual sacrifice is a religious rite", Giles went on quietly. "They wouldn't sacrifice ju...
We'll choose knowledge no matter what, we'll maim ourselves in the process, we'll stick our hands into the flames for it if necessary. Curiosity is not our only motive; love or grief or despair or hatred is what drives us on. We'll spy relentlessly o...
Life was about loss. One minute standing on the promise of your dreams, then free-falling backward into nothingness. Is this what it meant to grow old? To gradually be stripped of all you cared about. And then what? Were you supposed to spend the res...
From the vantage of a mid-1970's consensus that regarded the United States as having entered a post-Protestant era, the rise of a Religious Right dominated not only by Protestants but by fundamentalists was not the way the story was supposed to go. P...
Patience from a Buddhist perspective is not a "wait and see" attitude, but rather one of "just be there"... Patience can also be based on not expecting anything.Think of patience as an act of being open to whatever comes your way. When you begin to s...
Suppose a country starts its independence with the three economic characteristics that globally make a country prone to civil war: low income, slow growth, and dependence upon primary commodity exports. It is playing Russian roulette. That is not jus...
Sir Gerald Moore: I was at dinner last evening, and halfway through the pudding, this four-year-old child came alone, dragging a little toy cart. And on the cart was a fresh turd. Her own, I suppose. The parents just shook their heads and smiled. I'v...
Then you're aping him. Valentine was one of the most arrogant and disrespectful men I've ever met. I suppose he brought you up to be just like him." "Yes," Jace said, unable to help himself, "I was trained to be an evil mastermind from a young age. P...
Based on our badly borrowed misunderstanding of the words ‘secular’ and ‘spiritual’ we seem to have become blinded by the dominant intellectual ideology of our times, according to which schools as secular organizations are supposed to not hav...
So I make no effort to hide my pain. I don’t ever put it all on display like this—but for today and all the rest of the days of the trial, I must. My every flinch, every flicker of pain, will be magnified a hundred times over, then dissected by t...
After a few seconds of scraping, I realize what he has isn’t a trail, it’s a whole forest! Ack! Weren’t all men supposed to shave their chest and stuff nowadays? Whatever happened to having fuzz-free Hollywood heroes as role models? At least ...
I am deep in my willed habits. From the outside, I suppose I look like an unoccupied house with one unconvincing night-light left on. Any burglar could look through my curtains and conclude I am empty. But he would be mistaken. Under that one light u...
When anesthesia was developed, it was for many decades routinely withheld from women giving birth, since women were "supposed" to suffer. One of the few societies to take a contrary view was the Huichol tribe in Mexico. The Huichol believed that the ...
Suppose I were to give you a key ring [...] with a hundred keys, and I were to tell you that one of these keys will unlock it, this door we're imagining opening in onto all you want to be, as a player. How many of the keys would you be willing to try...
We must admit that simply knowing the contents of the Bible is not a sure route to spiritual growth. There is an aweful assumption in evangelical churches that if we can just get the Word of God into people's heads, then the Spirit of God will apply ...
The most insidious of the premature responsibilities that may be foisted onto some children is the expectation that the child is somehow supposed to take care of his parents, rather than the other way around. Parents who were themselves raised with t...
