To think of our prayers as just ‘causes’ would suggest that the whole importance of petitionary prayer lay in the achievement of the thing asked for. But really, for our spiritual life as a whole, the ‘being taken into account,’ or ‘conside...
Shut up!" I say, holding my hands to my ears. "Shut up!" But the stupid gummy won't shut up; he's trying to tell me something important even though I'm covering my ears and I don't want to hear it and I don't want to think about who I am or what's wr...
...alone in this city, alone on this sea. The days were strewn about him, he was a drunkard of days. He had achieved nothing. He had his life--it was not worth much--not like a life that, though ended, had truly been something. If I had had courage,h...
The resource of generational history is accorded little attention our society, which seems ever more obsessed with making “new” and “better” synonymous. From my family I became aware of the importance of passing along wisdom from one generati...
Better to forget, better to let go of the bitterness. I say bitterness is only good in medicine, or if you fry bitter gourd with egg, then it's dlicious. I told Lan-Lan many times, we have only one life, it's important to kua kwee, to look spaciously...
An important dimension of Tess of the d’Urbervilles is its debt to the oral tradition; to stories about wronged milkmaids, tales of superstition, and stories of love, betrayal and revenge, involving stock figures. This gives Tess of the d’Urbervi...
We are all alone, born alone, die alone, and--in spite of True Romance magazines --we shall all someday look back on our lives and see that, in spite of our company, we were alone the whole way. I do not say lonely --at least, not all the time --but ...
what does travel ultimately produce if it is not, by a sort of reversal, 'an exploration of the deserted places of my memory,' the return to nearby exoticism by way of a detour through distant places, and the 'discovery' of relics and legends: 'fleet...
The Princess attitude to food isn’t about obsessively scraping the oil off your salad, saying no to crème brûlée and taking a little snack bag of spinach everywhere you go. I truly believe it’s more important to consciously choose what you’r...
To speak only of food inspections: the United States currently imports 80% of its seafood, 32% of its fruits and nuts, 13% of its vegetables, and 10% of its meats. In 2007, these foods arrived in 25,000 shipments a day from about 100 countries. The F...
Ask your child for information in a gentle, nonjudgmental way, with specific, clear questions. Instead of “How was your day?” try “What did you do in math class today?” Instead of “Do you like your teacher?” ask “What do you like about ...
I loved looking at the stars—they put in perspective how small I was compared to the Universe. Each of those hundreds of billions of stars was its own sun. It could have its own solar system of planets orbiting around it, and some of those planets ...
The way we live our lives is not sustainable. I don’t just mean recycling and turning off the faucet while brushing your teeth. I mean the way we treat each other. The way we pick and choose whose lives are important – who we actually treat as hu...
Each of our devoted investigators has had to protest the critical importance to science and the surpassing conveniences offered by the cabin: How well the hill-and-dale floor is held together by layered patches of variegated linoleum; how nicely the ...
Artists use frauds to make human beings seem more wonderful than they really are. Dancers show us human beings who move much more gracefully than human beings really move. Films and books and plays show us people talking much more entertainingly than...
The central attitudes driving Mr. Sensitive are: I’m against the macho men, so I couldn’t be abusive. As long as I use a lot of “psychobabble,” no one is going to believe that I am mistreating you. I can control you by analyzing how your mind...
Men were created before women. ... But that doesn't prove their superiority – rather, it proves ours, for they were born out of the lifeless earth in order that we could be born out of living flesh. And what's so important about this priority in cr...
When I got to college, the fake ID thing wasn't that important, since pretty much everyone could get away with drinking in New Orleans. But the drugs, well, that was a different story altogether, because drugs are every bit as illegal in New Orleans ...
I had built such a wall between my experiences and how I felt about those experiences that I was incapable of reliving both simultaneously. I could talk about my traumas, even walk through them, but I couldn’t feel them. When I tried to bring it al...
From: Beth Fremont To: Jennifer Scribner-Snyder Sent: Thurs, 09/30/1999 3:42 PM Subject: If you were Superman … … and you could choose any alter ego you wanted, why the hell would you choose to spend your Clark Kent hours — which already suck b...
My hair is not the shiniest of bobs My eyes are not the brightest in the room My figure will not get me modeling jobs My smile will not bring young boys to their doom. But do I cry and mourn my average face? Or wish that I had boyfriends at the ready...
