I had a dream about you. We were waiting in line, and you were right in front of me. The line was three people long, and I felt like the bronze medalist of the Checkout Championship. You must have felt like a winner, because you didn’t seem to be i...
The wise thing is for us diligently to train ourselves to lie thoughtfully, judiciously; to lie with a good object, and not an evil one; to lie for others' advantage, and not our own; to lie healingly, charitably, humanely, not cruelly, hurtfully, ma...
Now the line is: Forget the classics, concentrate on an education for the 21st century! Which apparently means knowing how to operate electronic devices and figure out a spreadsheet. That's not education, it's vocational training. What once were mean...
For the hundredth time, he examined his face in the bathroom mirror, patiently touched every scratch with the styptic pencil, and repowdered them. He ministered to his face and hands objectively, as if they were not a part of himself. When his eyes m...
This was supposed to be yesterday. I was sitting on the Cardiff/London train, supposedly about to write this very column, and realising something quite terrible. My head was entirely empty. A vast echoing void. Bigger on the inside, but with nothing ...
I could have been a better mother. My children assure me it was fine. But when you are running to catch the train to go to a rehearsal, and you know your kid has a hacking cough... We said we can have it all and do it all: I can have four children, w...
When they see the light at the end of the tunnel, some people run towards it. I, however, run from it as fast as I can because I know that it's attatched to a speeding train coming in our direction. And if I were you, staring at that light drooling a...
The strength of human instinct seems to be quite overrated as it is so feeble it requires a lifetime of guidance, education, training and practical experience to develop. More critically, without conscious and diligent effort across one generation to...
She was never going to seek gainful employment again, that was for certain. She'd remain outside the public sector. She'd be an anarchist, she'd travel with jaguars. She was going to train herself to be totally irrational. She'd fall in love with a t...
I've been doing acting since I was 6 years old, and I don't know how to do anything besides act and sing. Back in the day, you had to do it all - you had to sing, dance, and act. I'm from the old school where that is what I was trained to do, and tha...
When I was young I wanted to be just like him. One of the charm, of a bright orange smile and muscular laughter. Bold brown eyes flashing fearless when he sat not alone on cold blue nights in empty boxcars. Riding a freight train's solitary wail away...
Everybody wants a miracle; we just don't want to be in a situation where we need one. You can't have one without the other. Sometimes what we perceive as our problem is really God setting us up to do something miraculous in our lives. It's about trai...
People like the leaders; they like to follow them; they let the leaders to think on behalf of them; they like shepherds; they like to behave like sheep! For god’s sake, follow your own path, be an individual, be independent! Stop being a coach in t...
Each actor is different. When I did 'Misery,' Kathy Bates, who's a stage trained actress, loves lots of rehearsal. Jimmy Caan, who basically grew up on films, likes no rehearsal. He wants to just get in there, and whatever happens at the moment, it h...
Every woman knows what I'm talking about. It’s the presumption that makes it hard, at times, for any woman in any field; that keeps women from speaking up and from being heard when they dare; that crushes young women into silence by indicating, the...
What I find predictable is crazy people's ability to predict that unpredictable people can be predicted by their consistent unpredictable behavior, thus making all crazy people predictable when the world says they are unpredictable. Therefore, I must...
A game one of my sisters will play with me in my first year of being alive is called Good Baby, Bad Baby. This consists of being told I am a good baby until I smile and laugh, then being told I am a bad baby until I burst into tears. This training wi...
If I eat something a little crazy or if I feel sluggish, I know I have to eat better the next day and work out. I work out, I do circuit training so I try to keep my heart rate up whether I'm doing cardio, lifting weights or jumping rope. I like to m...
From the simplest lyric to the most complex novel, literature is asking us to pay attention. Pay attention to the frog. Pay attention to the west wind. Pay attention to the boy on the raft, the lady on the tower, the old man on the train. In sum, pay...
One cannot always know what children are thinking. Children are hard to understand, especially when careful training has accustomed them to obedience, and experience has made them cautious in their conversation with their teachers. Will you not draw ...
History consists, for the greater part, of the miseries brought upon the world by pride, ambition, avarice, revenge, lust, sedition, hypocrisy, ungoverned zeal, and all the train of disorderly appetites, which shake the public with the same —“tro...
