Committing suicide essentially said to friends and loved ones and the world at large that you were the only thing that mattered, that your problems were hopeless that you deserved to escape from them and to hell with everyone else. Suicide was nothin...
The very purpose of designing the Temple of Jerusalem as a series of ever more restrictive ingressions was to maintain the priestly monopoly over who can and cannot come into the presence of God and to what degree. The sick, the lame, the leper, the ...
Can I have a motorcycle when I get old enough?" "If you take care of it." "What do you have to do?" "Lot's of things. You've been watching me." "Will you show me all of them?" "Sure." "Is it hard?" "Not if you have the right attitudes. It's having th...
There are times in our lives when we labor so hard, for so long, that it may feel that we have nothing to show for it. That we have failed. We get discouraged, because we don’t achieve what we yearned for or anticipated. But a lack of desired resul...
Public truth telling is a form of recovery, especially when combined with social action. Sharing traumatic experiences with others enables victims to reconstruct repressed memory, mourn loss, and master helplessness, which is trauma's essential insul...
Why were Jack and his brother digging post holes? A fence there would run parallel to the one that already enclosed the farmyard. The Welches had no animals to keep in or out - a fence there could serve no purpose. Their work was pointless. Years lat...
He stops pacing. 'I know, Miranda, I did it because I—' 'Stop! Don't say it. I don't want to hear you say it.' 'I have to say it,' Noah says. 'No, you don't.' If I hear him say the word love, I don't know what I'll do. I still have my gun. Maybe on...
...it pointed to an alternative approach, a ‘negative path’ to happiness, that entailed taking a radically different stance towards those things that most of us spend our lives trying to avoid. It involved learning to enjoy uncertainty, embracing...
Building your "dream life" is filled with things that can feel like the opposite of a dream: Mistakes Delays Starting over Failure The building part is actually more of a rebuilding that is a continual process. The building is not linear in nature bu...
If we are to believe he is really alive with all that that implies, then we have to believe without proof. And of course that is the only way it could be. If it could be somehow proved, then we would have no choice but to believe. We would lose our f...
Do you see those dull stars?" She outlined the formation with her finger. "A pentagram," whispered Scott. "Yes, but not just any pentagram. Take a look through the telescope." Scott approached the eyepiece. "They're not stars!" "What do they look lik...
In any case, while it is all very well to talk of 'turning points', one can surely only recognise such moments in retrospect. Naturally, when one looks back to such instances today, they may indeed take the appearance of being crucial, precious momen...
This time of year," she said, "people’s consciences gnaw at them. They give away truckloads of canned goods and quote Dickens and wring their hands over the ‘less fortunate.’" We boarded the Metro and took seats perpendicular to each other. "Bu...
At Garvin High we were dealt a hard dose of reality this year. People hate. That's our reality. People hate and are hated and carry grudges and want punishments ... I don't know if it's possible to take hate away from people. Not even people like us,...
Meditation is misunderstood as something you envision in your head, when in fact it is something to be seen with your own eyes. What you begin to see is that the place where you thought your life occurred - the cave of rumination and memory, the caul...
I looked after that Dudley family for too long, over six years. His daddy would take him to the garage and whip him with a rubber hose-pipe trying to beat the girl out a that boy until I couldn't stand it no more.... I wish to God I'd told John Green...
I sat and asked God a question, never before now had I felt he was truly listening; Or was it i, that disrupted his appearance... Why God, must the treasures of our world be hard done by and the enemies of life become greater in their scheme of manip...
I like to skip prewriting. I love just jumping into the actual writing process. Then I revise/edit and fix what I need to. Then the following steps; proofread and publish. Of course before you just go into writing, it would be a good idea to do some ...
I believe, if there is some sort of higher power, the universe is it. Whenever religious people ask me where the universe came from, I tell them that it has always been here, and was never created. The Big Bang theory is based on the fact that the un...
When you're traveling you need to take care of yourself to get by, you have to keep an eye on yourself and your place in the world. It means concentrating on yourself, thinking about yourself and looking after yourself. So when you travel all you rea...
There is a sacred calling on your life, and the question is: Will you spend your life flittering and fluttering about or take the time and really heed that call and create your own path to your highest good?...You cannot let other people define your ...
