Just take the weapon you hold in your hand and drive it through his heart," Valentine's voice was soft. "One simple motion. Nothing you haven't done before." Jace met his father's stare with a level gaze. "I saw Agramon," he said. "It had your face."...
i thank You God for most this amazing day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything which is natural which is infinite which is yes (i who have died am alive again today, and this is the sun's birthday...
The door of the bar opened, showing him a momentary oblong of true daylight, blankly white. A woman entered. He couldn't see her face as she crossed to the bar in front of the window, but he could see, drawn with exactitude by the light behind her, h...
The ethical aspect of the Law of Thelema is simple enough theoretically. "Do what thou wilt" does not mean "do what you please"; though this degree of emancipation is implied, that we can no longer say that any given course of action is "wrong". Ever...
Two things are to be remembered: that a man whose opinions and theories are worth studying may be presumed to have had some intelligence, but that no man is likely to have arrived at complete and final truth on any subject whatever. When an intellige...
You know, it's pretty easy reading this book to see why I was angry and confused for all those years. I lived my life being told different stories: some true, some lies and I still don't know which is which. Children are born innocent. At birth we ar...
I couldn't believe my good luck when you came back to the bar," he confessed. His voice sounded hoarse, grinding out past the lump in his throat. "You're even more beautiful now than you were when I met you." She wasn't all that impressed by his hone...
You don't need to retire to a cloister or the desert for years on end to experience a true dark night; you don't even have to be pursuing any particular "spiritual" path. Raising a challenged child, or caring for a failing parent for years on end, is...
As everyone who has read the Marxists critically has not failed to see... the gospel of St. Marx is just the old Judaeo-Christian mythology with the supernatural sanctions left out, thus making the cult the most implausible and unreasonable of all th...
What never fails inside the mind of an intellectual never works outside the confines of his head. The world’s stubborn refusal to vindicate the intellectual’s theories serves as proof of humanity’s irrationality, not his own. Thus, the true bel...
We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century - the blindness about which posterity will ask, "But how could they have thought that?" - lies where we have never suspected it... None of us can fully escape this blindness, b...
There is nothing distinctively scientific about the hypothetico-deductive process. It is not even distinctively intellectual. It is merely a scientific context for a much more general stratagem that underlies almost all regulative processes or proces...
<...> slaves became the major form of Southern wealth (aside from land), and slaveholding became the means to prosperity. <...> The later impoverishment of the South nourished the myth that the slave economy had always been historically “backward,�...
I like the idea that when I die, I will have a long sit-down chat with God and get answers to all my questions. For example, those apple cores that I threw out of car windows when I was a child—did any of them become trees? Few boys or men had ever...
I have gone to war and now I can issue my complaint. I can sit on my porch and complain all day. And you must listen. Some of you will say to me: You signed the contract, you crying bitch, and you fought in a war because of your signature, no one hel...
It is widely unknown, but nonetheless true that Catholicism fervently promotes the 'spiritual disciplines' whereas Protestantism has largely neglected them altogether. Does 'volunteerism' facilitate the formation of Christ's character in us or rather...
For several thousand years man has been in contact with animals whose character and habits have been deformed by domestication. He has ended by believing that he understands them. All he means by this is that he is able to rely on certain reflex acti...
The artist is often misunderstood because, stepping outside himself and holding most details in great tension, he's about as complex as a shape-shifter; or a head with faces on all sides, but not necessarily in the negative connotation as one being t...
A rumor is a social cancer: it is difficult to contain and it rots the brains of the masses. However, the real danger is that so many people find rumors enjoyable. That part causes the infection. And in such cases when a rumor is only partially made ...
It’s said that sport is the civilised society’s substitute for war, and also that the games we play as children are designed to prepare us for the realities of adult life. Certainly it’s true that my brother thrived in the capitalist kindergart...
In many areas of life, freedom is not so much the absence of restrictions as finding the right ones, the liberating restrictions. Those that fit with the reality of our nature and the world produce greater power and scope for our abilities and a deep...
