At home I used to spend calm, pleasant nights with my family. My mother knit scarves for the neighborhood kids. My father helped Caleb with his homework. There was a fire in the fireplace and peace in my heart, as I was doing exactly what I was suppo...
William: My brother has an appreciation of art, so I imagine the woman he chooses must be beautiful beyond the pale. Once he outgrows his current predilection with painting and accepts his family responsibilities, he'll need a wife who can move throu...
Butterfly Kisses Aged imperfections stitched upon my face years and years of wisdom earned by His holy grace. Quiet solitude in a humble home all the family scattered now like nomads do they roam. Then a gift sent from above a memory pure and tangibl...
Without fail, he always signed off on these letters with love and he always included Whiskey and Bess in the list of individuals sending this love my way. At the time it made me laugh, it made me embarrassed, but as soon as I softened, as soon as I m...
Keep my soul safe. Phantom Lagoon is my home; my safe harbor. I no longer belong to a family; I am a loner. I feel no pain here, because it does not exist; nor will I let it exist. My soul is concealed in this stone; it is my life. I must let go, for...
God’s side is determined not by geography, but by those who do His will. If Germans, English, Japanese, and Americans prayed right, they would all be praying for the same intention: Thy Will be done on earth as it is in Heaven. And what is that Wil...
There will always be wars," Maggie told him. "Yes," Reeve replied. "But there will also be brothers, sisters, comrades and lovers as well, and they are who we fight for. Our comrades--our brothers--beside us on the field; our wives and families at ho...
I never thought to ascribe my mother's emotional and physical exhaustion to the lack of a husband and father; rather, I ascribed it to my existence. In other words, I grew up learning the exact opposite of what Eisenhower was taught. I learned that i...
I have lived through much, and now I think I have found what is needed for happiness. A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to th...
Many of you would like to take evil and step on it, destroying it like you would a bug. Squish, smash! Begone into another reality! This practice of eliminating human life because it is perceived as evil does you no good. In the end your history and ...
There is a word I have always avoided in my writing, my life, my thoughts. That word is love. What does it mean? How do you deal with it? If you find it and lose it, how do you get over it? Love is something you feel and when you feel it you can’t ...
You know, I really think that when God puts together families, he sticks his finger into the white pages and selects a group of people at random and then says to them all, 'Hey! You're going to spend the next seventy years together, even though you h...
Books are a bad family - there are those you love, and those you are indifferent to; idiots and mad cousins who you would banish except others enjoy their company; wrongheaded but fascinating eccentrics and dreamy geniuses; orphaned grandchildren; an...
Well, friend, I don’t know about your tastes, but I tend to like it very bloody,” Myrnin said. He shifted position, dragging Claire along like a rag doll without any effort at all. “Have we been introduced?” “Probably not. Why, are you aski...
It took nearly a year to finish the ever-changing [marriage candidates] list, with the assistance of his sister and his aging spinster aunt, who lorded over their affairs as the self-appointed voice of cultivated reason. During this time, Gabriel str...
Cultural wisdom says 'Don't quit your day job.' Yet I think these desires represent our psyche's stretch toward wholeness. And to be whole, as many religious tranditions teach, is to make manifest a unique face of God in the world. We don't want to b...
It is an axiom of modern social psychology that the stories that tend to get repeated are the ones that somehow have the potential to strengthen the communities in which they are told, or to enhance the relationship between the teller and the hearer....
You'd think family would be the one sure thing in life, the gimme? Points you got just for being born? So much thick, meaty stuff bound you to these people, so many interlocking spirals of history, genetics, common cause, and struggle that it should ...
Yes, he scorned his family’s decadent ways, but perhaps that wasn’t so much about the money , but rather the wastefulness of it; the lack of energy and drive it represented, as if the Ransomes were—like that postmodern throng of the famous-for-...
Women without children are also the best of mothers,often, with the patience,interest, and saving grace that the constant relationship with children cannot always sustain. I come to crave our talk and our daughters gain precious aunts. Women who are ...
The Americans were constantly hectoring Africans about their behavior and values—protecting oneself against AIDS, limited family size, sleeping under mosquito nets. Chinese messages… focused on big, tangible things that fairly shouted: This stadi...
