Because travel was an area of my life where I felt most vital, I wanted to continue to invest in that, too. I had quit a full time job, drained my retirement account to invest in a long-held dream, and used the realization of that dream to enter a vo...
Dear Sir, poor sir, brave sir." he read, "You are an experiment by the Creator of the Universe. You are the only creature in the entire Universe who has free will. You are the only one who has to figure out what to do next - and why. Everybody else i...
Dogs have always provided a special kind of love and companionship that I experience only some of the time with humans. They have a strong sense of character and live the way we ought to: dogs never compare you to your sister nor make judgments in he...
I've begun worshipping the sun for a number of reasons. First of all, unlike some other gods I could mention, I can see the sun. It's there for me every day. And the things it brings me are quite apparent all the time: heat, light, food, and a lovely...
I am not my sister. Words from the books curl around each other make little sense until I read them again and again, the story settling into memory. my teacher says. the teacher says. . But I don't want to read faster or older or any way else that mi...
Reason is up to these demands because it is an open-ended combinatorial system, an engine for generating an unlimited number of new ideas. Once it is programmed with a basic self-interest and an ability to communicate with others, its own logic will ...
The scriptures present a God who delights in genocide, rape, slavery, and the execution of nonconformists, and for millennia those writings were used to rationalize the massacre of infidels, the ownership of women, the beating of children, dominion o...
And what we’ve been always been is…?” “Is living on borrowed time. Never caring about who’s paying for it, who’s starving somewhere else all jammed together so we can have cheap food, a house, a yard in the burbs … planetwide, more ever...
One of my biggest weaknesses, one that has always shamed me, is that I have always been lonely. I've struggled to make friends because I can be socially awkward, because I'm weird, because I live in my head. When I was young, we moved around a lot, s...
Consider all the inanimate matter in the universe, all the dumb atoms, all the mindless molecules, all the oblivious dust grains and pebbles and rocks and iceballs and worlds and stars, all the unthinking galaxies and superclusters, wheeling through ...
In the country whereto I go I shall not see the face of my friend Nor her hair the color of sunburnt grasses; Together we shall not find The land on whose hills bends the new moon In air traversed of birds. What have I thought of love? I have said, "...
Far be it from me to slow down two badass supermodels on a mission, but we have a problem," a male voice said wryly. I could see Christian out of the corner of my eye as we turned, his stance and movements almost synchronized to my own. We shared a l...
Could it be? Samantha Kingston? Home? On a Friday?” I roll my eyes. “I don’t know. Did you do a lot of acid in the sixties? Could be a flashback.” “I was two years old in 1960. I came too late for the party.” He leans down and pecks me on...
Patience from a Buddhist perspective is not a "wait and see" attitude, but rather one of "just be there"... Patience can also be based on not expecting anything.Think of patience as an act of being open to whatever comes your way. When you begin to s...
... there was one new metallic monstrosity stacked in one corner that she hadn’t seen the last time she was a visitor to his strange chamber, it appeared to be a mass of hard drives all fused together, but they looked too sophisticated to be merely...
Tyler rolls out of bed, sniffs the armpits of yesterday's T-shirt, tosses it aside, gets another out of the drawer. His dad sometimes asks him why he sets his alarm so early -- it's summer vacation, after all -- and Tyler can't seem to make him under...
In truth she is not a hard lady naturally, and the time has been when the sight of the venerable figure suing to her with such strong earnestness would have moved her to great compassion. But so long accustomed to suppress emotion and keep down reali...
Fyodor Pavlovitch was drunk when he heard of his wife's death, and the story is that he ran out into the street and began shouting with joy, raising his hands to Heaven: "Lord, now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace," but others say he wept wit...
I tell you, the old-fashioned doctor who treated all diseases has completely disappeared, now there are only specialists, and they advertise all the time in the newspapers. If your nose hurts, they send you to Paris: there's a European specialist the...
Hey, a guy can hope. I mean, it’s not impossible that a car full of scantily clad sorority girls might break down outside and need my help.” “That’s true,” I said. “Maybe I can put a sign out front that says, ‘ATTENTION ALL GIRLS: FREE ...
