My ancestors fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War; I was raised in Natchez, Miss.; I performed in the Confederate Pageant for a decade; I dug ditches and loaded trucks with black men who taught me more than any book ever could; and I gradu...
Ed Bloom (Age 10): I was thinking about death and all. About seeing how you're gonna die. I mean, on one hand, if dying was all you thought about, it could kind of screw you up. But it could kind of help you, couldn't it? Because you'd know that ever...
I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own -- a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his bo...
As I have discovered by examining my past, I started out as a child. Coincidentally, so did my brother. My mother did not put all her eggs in one basket, so to speak: she gave me a younger brother named Russell, who taught me what was meant by 'survi...
When you’re poor and hungry and frightened of failure, you often don’t have the luxury of high values, lofty goals, and social conscience. Funny how fear and poverty will acid-wash your value set, burn away all the flimflam and artifice and learn...
Don't you have a religion?" Dorolow asked Horza. "Yes," he replied, not taking his eyes away from the screen on the wall above the end of the main mess-room table. "My survival." "So... your religion dies with you. How sad," Dorolow said, looking bac...
Whoever said that love hurts was wrong. Love is excruciating, especially when you can feel it slipping through your fingers and there is nothing you can do about it. Like someone was playing tug-of-war with my limbs, ripping to shreds whatever was le...
He leaned toward me. Suddenly the space between us shrank. "I will do everything in my power to ensure your survival, and should the need arise, I will put myself between danger and you." His voice was quiet and intimate. "Do not hesitate to use me a...
...it occurred to me that I could use the energy I had been putting into endurance to change my life. Yet the concept of brunt, of accepting and enduring, still seems to me to have a kind of nobility. It is, perhaps, less intelligent, but there is a ...
So every dollar spent on finding some gene or hormone to explain why becoming fat is not because of sugary drinks, fried foods or unchecked gluttony is a dollar spent on getting food for the hungry, vaccines for babies, shelter for the homeless. But ...
But words are things, and a small drop of ink, Falling like dew, upon a thought, produces That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think; ’T is strange, the shortest letter which man uses Instead of speech, may form a las...
I remember as a child of eight being told by a young friend that I had killed Christ. That was news to me. It's a common experience for the Jewish young. Should later generations of Germans be burdened with the guilt arising from the profound inhuman...
I am easily moved to tears and rarely survive a visit to the cinema without shedding them, racked, as I am, by the most perfunctory, meretricious or even callously sentimental attempts at poignancy (something about the exterior of the human face, so ...
It may be said, in broad-brush terms, that the primary purpose of life is the continuation of life. A deep program for survival and reproduction underwrites the complex cycles of life, in which death is the grand equalizer. There is, however, a pecul...
Devotion is a spiritual act of egoless surrender. When the Self blinds the spirit too tightly, then devotion expands the blinding by lifting us beyond ourselves. We get the powerful lesson that the Self survives even without constant attention.
I think you’re wrong,” she said. “I don’t think humans were supposed to die out during the Infection. And I think those of us who survived have a duty to protect the next generation. We’re starting over, Justin. We’re rebuilding the world...
For bighorns, topography is memory, enhanced by acute vision. They can anticipate the land's every contour--when to leap, where to climb, when to turn, which footholds will support their muscular bodies. To survive, this is what the band would have t...
Marxism teaches that exploitation and degradation somehow produce resistance and revolution. It's been hard to say why. What I've learned from women's experience with sexuality is that exploitation and degradation produce grateful complicity in excha...
Events cast their shadows ahead; before a harsh winter, wild animals grow thicker fur, and the beaver puts on a thicker layer of fat. What kind of times and what sort of tasks can lie ahead for a generation that must think so harshly, even at such a ...
I walked to his bedside table next. Infinite Mayhem. the ninth sequel to The Prince of Dawn, lay atop the table next to his reading lamp, the corner of page 138 turned down. He'd never made it to the end of the book. 'Spoiler alert: Mayhem survives,'...
If we are considering the history of our own country, we write at length of the periods when our ancestors were prosperous and victorious, but we pass quickly over their shortcomings or their defeats. Our people are represented as patriotic heroes, t...
