I'm less concerned with how hard you can work and how much time and effort you can dedicate to a project when everything is going right. Plenty of people can do that. I'm more concerned with how hard you can work and how much time and effort you can ...
There were people who went to sleep last night, poor and rich and white and black, but they will never wake again. And those dead folks would give anything at all for just five minutes of this weather or ten minutes of plowing. So you watch yourself ...
Writers are much better behaved nowadays, for a couple of reasons. Once upon a time nobody was thinking of a career, unless you lived in New York, so there wasn’t as much pressure to present a respectable exterior. And secondly, there was no social...
She looked at her note cards and took a breath. "Why I Love America, by Hayley McDonald's. America is the greatest group of countries in the world because we have freedom. In countries like France, where the Government isn't privatized, they still ha...
I know its totally senseless to attempt to write something 'great' in a time where people seem mostly concerned with bashing each other heads in, there's only 1 bestseller a year that a 12 year old would find tedious, and the entire Human Race will p...
Cassie fumbled helplessly beneath the shade of the ancient oak, still searching for her second shoe.The first had been easy to find, having landed close to where she had kicked it off; and when her hand had finally encountered it, she clutched it to ...
One may enter the literary parlor via just about any door, be it the prison door, the madhouse door, or the brothel door. There is but one door one may not enter it through, which is the child room door. The critics will never forgive you such. The g...
Now here's somebody who wants to smoke a marijuana cigarette. If he's caught, he goes to jail. Now is that moral? Is that proper? I think it's absolutely disgraceful that our government, supposed to be our government, should be in the position of con...
She knows how to feed her soul with a few quick breaths of outdoor air from the stairwell. She can bide her time till freedom comes. Little fox lady with her bright and determined eyes... taking her dose of freedom three times a day. Nothing else mat...
The gospel is unintelligible to most people today, especially in the West, because their own particular stories are remote from the story of creation, fall, redemption, and consummation that is narrated in the Bible. Our focus is introspective and na...
I met with a man. His name is, "Michael Bush", a very sophisticated sage. He said to me, "Michael, don't associate yourself with people in your age bracket, but relate with elderly men, who had achieve in life far more greater than you, and then, the...
Oftentimes at Yale, I'll be sitting around studying or drinking or hanging out when I'll hear one of my friends talk about a project they're doing for a class or a rally they're organizing or a play they're putting on. And I'll just think, really, ho...
I used to say to my classes that the ways to get insight are: to study infants; to study animals; to study primitive people; to be psychoanalyzed; to have a religious conversion and get over it; to have a psychotic episode and get over it; or to have...
One way of emphasizing the singularity of the recent past is [..] to observe that the total number of humans ever to have lived is estimated at around (a bit less than) 100 billion. One of Walt Whitman's poems has a memorable image—thinking of all ...
Ask one question: Would a Millennial (anyone born between 1980 and 2000) look forward to working here? Try this exercise. Take a group of people into a large, open room with tackable wall surfaces or whiteboards. Give them large sheets of paper, stic...
It's so funny being a Christian musician. It always scares me when people think so highly of Christian music, Contemporary Christian music especially. Because I kinda go, I know a lot of us, and we don't know jack about anything. Not that I don't wan...
If other people owe you an apology, and your words of apology to them are proper and heartfelt, you still may not hear from them for a while. After all, what are the odds that they get to the right emotional place to apologize at the exact moment you...
In South Africa, they dig for diamonds. Tons of earth are moved to find a little pebble not as large as a little fingernail. The miners are looking for the diamonds, not the dirt. They are willing to lift all the dirt in order to find the jewels. In ...
What Walter thinks is that people are like rivers. We never stay in the same place but jest keep flowing along, learning new stuff and picking up new experiences and changing all the time. So today’s you isn’t the same as yesterday’s you and wo...
I would like travelers, especially American travelers, to travel in a way that broadens their perspective, because I think Americans tend to be some of the most ethnocentric people on the planet. It's not just Americans, it's the big countries. It's ...
I have always found it odd that people who think passive aggressively ignoring a person is making a point to them. The only point it makes to anyone is your inability to articulate your point of view because deep down you know you can’t win. It’s...
