As if reading his mind, Lily huffed. “You’re as predictable as the spring rains, son of mine, and as boring as drying paint. Unless there’s an emergency, you’re home every night by seven, you eat dinner go for a run, watch exactly one hour of...
We are living in a time when sensitivities are at the surface, often vented with cutting words. Philosophically, you can believe anything so as you do not claim it a better way. Religiously, you can hold to anything, so long as you do not bring Jesus...
Ignore the real world “That would never work in the real world.” You hear it all the time when you tell people about a fresh idea. This real world sounds like an awfully depressing place to live. It’s a place where new ideas, unfamiliar approac...
Oh, what can you do with a man like that? What can you do? How can you dissuade his eye in a crowd from seeking out the cheek with acne, the infirm hand; how can you teach him to respond to the inestimable greatness of the race, the harsh surface bea...
On the edge of a tropical ocean, in a thousand reflections of the silver light of an invisible moon, among undulations of restless waters, ceaselessly changing... Among silent breakers, the tremors of the shining surface, in the swift flux and reflux...
The Pacific, greatest of oceans, has an area exceeding that of all dry land on the planet. Herman Melville called it "the tide-beating heart of earth." Covering more than a third of the planet's surface--as much as the Atlantic, Indian, and Arctic oc...
Sorry, I got hung up or I’d have been here earlier. I made sure I made it for closing, though. I didn’t want the streets to suffer if you walked alone.” A glance at him showed his lips twitching. Humor, a new facet to my knight in leather armor...
On April 18, 1906, when that earthquake hit San Francisco and took David from her, Vivien began to speak the language of grief. She understood that grief is not neat and orderly; it does not follow any rules. Time does not heal it. Rather, time insis...
Kuan Yin is showing me picture of a windsurfer skimming effortlessly along the ocean's surface," describes Ms. Lees. "While quite skilled, he is nevertheless very focused on the elements around him. The windsurfer is focused upon how to turn the sail...
We wrap up our violent and mysterious world in a pretense of understanding. We paper over the voids of our comprehension with science and religion, and make believe that order has been imposed. And, for the most of it, the fiction works. We skim acro...
Help!" This was my last cry. My mouth filled with water, I struggled against being drawn the abyss. Suddenly my clothes were seized by a strong hand, and I felt myself quickly drawn up to the surface of the sea; and I heard, yes, I heard these words ...
The person with a secular mentality feels himself to be the center of the universe. Yet he is likely to suffer from a sense of meaninglessness and insignificance because he knows he’s but one human among five billion others - all feeling themselves...
There is a fine line between humility and humiliation, and when Augustine’s critics, both loyal and disloyal, fault him for morbid self-criticism, they generally mean to imply that he has crossed the line. You can have a relationship with another p...
In 1913, when Anthony Patch was twenty-five, two years were already gone since irony, the Holy Ghost of this later day, had, theoretically at least, descended upon him. Irony was the final polish of the shoe, the ultimate dab of the clothes-brush, a ...
In communities, at work, but particularly in families, people are put together in something like a three-legged race. God means us to cross the finish line together, and all the other people tied together with us play some part in our progress. They ...
The truth is that she was always much more forgiving of animals than people...Her sympathy for the underdog--or the underwasp, underrat, undercat, undersnail, underbird, underspider, undermouse, undergecko, undercentipede--was limitless. In the depth...
[last lines] [spoiler] Alexander Kerner: [voiceover] My mother outlived the GDR by three days. I believe it was a good thing she never learned the truth. She died happy. She wanted us to scatter her ashes to the winds. That's prohibited in Germany, b...
Seaman Jones: [Jonesy is teaching Beaumont] Hear it now? Beaumont: [resigned] No. Seaman Jones: Beaumont, at Caltech we used to do this in our sleep! You hear it now? Beaumont: Wait a minute... Seaman Jones: Uh oh... Beaumont: Disparaged surface clut...
[last lines] Dr. Floyd: [prerecorded message speaking through TV on board Discovery while Bowman looks on] Good day, gentlemen. This is a prerecorded briefing made prior to your departure and which for security reasons of the highest importance has b...
Virgil: You know, I can't believe you were dumb enough to come down here. Now you're stuck here for the storm. That was dumb, hot rod. Real dumb. Lindsey Brigman: I didn't come down here to fight with you. Virgil: Yeah? Well, why did you come down th...
Loving a band with all your heart is something you understand when it happens to you. On the surface, others can see its a petty obsession, but they'll just never know the feeling of putting so much fail into a few people on the other side of the wor...
