APRIL this year, not otherwise Than April of a year ago Is full of whispers, full of sighs, Dazzling mud and dingy snow; Hepaticas that pleased you so Are here again, and butterflies. There rings a hammering all day, And shingles lie about the doors;...
My interest in Sufism began when I was a college student. At the time, I was a rebellious young woman who liked to wrap several shawls of ‘-isms’ around her shoulders: I was a leftist, feminist, nihilist, environmentalist, anarcho-pacifist…I wa...
You can make a successful run for political office in this country without an especially thick résumé, any exceptional talent for expressing yourself, a noteworthy education or, for that matter, a basic grasp of science. But you better have religio...
If originality is a “sense of novelty and freshness” then, in the act of constructing ourselves, originality is not the goal. We construct a self-portrait, relying on existing objects – books, quotes from authors and artists, images, art – th...
In the heart of the mystic lies a deep longing to be reunited with the ancient ways, coupled with a yearning to be able to show others what she can see. She wants to show others what she can see. Sadly, more often than not, others do not have the eye...
Here are the facts. Coronary artery disease is the leading killer of men and women in Western civilization. In the United States alone, more than half a million people die of it every single year. Three times that number suffer known heart attacks. A...
I believe that the truth is the only force that will set us free. I have hope, not in the tangible or in what I can personally accomplish, but in the faith that battling evil, cruelty, and injustice allows us to retain our identity, a sense of meanin...
I still feel glad to emphasize the duty, the defining characteristic of the pure scientist—probably to be found working in universities—who commit themselves absolutely to specialized goals, to seek the purest manifestation of any possible phenom...
I can see why people find him [Hugo Chávez] charming. He's very ebullient, as they say. I've heard him make a speech, though, and he has a vice that's always very well worth noticing because it's always a bad sign: he doesn't know when to sit down. ...
It's far easier to write why something is terrible than why it's good. If you're reviewing a film and you decide "This is a movie I don't like," basically you can take every element of the film and find the obvious flaw, or argue that it seems ridicu...
When something terrible happens, a lifetime of small events and unremarkable decisions, of unresolved anger, and unexplored fears begins to play itself out in ways you least expect. You've been going along from one day to the next, not realizing that...
If only you and I (or you or I) doesn't go and die before we have a chance to meet! And yet, if we did no doubt there would be some good and loving reason for it. I am (except in bad moods) more convinced of that all the time. We shall meet and be ha...
In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out. By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets... Hence true Friendship is the leas...
I would love to believe that when I die I will live again, that some thinking, feeling, remembering part of me will continue. But much as I want to believe that, and despite the ancient and worldwide cultural traditions that assert an afterlife, I kn...
The night I sat down to read Dostoievski for the first time was a most important event in my life, even more important than my first love. It was the first deliberate, conscious act which had significance for me; it changed the whole face of the worl...
The new mathematics is a sort of supplement to language, affording a means of thought about form and quantity and a means of expression,more exact,compact, and ready than ordinary language. The great body of physical science, a great deal of the esse...
Her tears fell abundantly--but her grief was so truly artless, that no dignity could have made it more respectable in Emma's eyes--and she listened to her and tried to console her with all her heart and understanding--really for the time convinced th...
They danced again, and when the assembly closed, parted, on the lady’s side at least, with a strong inclination for continuing the acquaintance. Whether she thought of him so much while she drank her warm wine and water and prepared herself for bed...
color makes people kill, money makes people change, religion makes people fight, but if love can make people forget about why they hate, and if human compassion can give a 5 dollar bill, clothes, or food to a homeless man, woman, or child then this w...
As a young gay African, I have been conditioned from an early age to consider my sexuality a dangerous deviation from my true heritage as a Somali by close kin and friends. As a young gay African coming of age in London, there was another whiplash of...
As an author the question I get asked the most is, “why do you write?” My knee jerk response is, “Because I love it,” which is true, but not the whole truth. So here is my revised response to that question; “I write for the thirteen year ol...
