There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, "Thy will be done," and those to whom God says, in the end, "Thy will be done." All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriou...
“You are my enemy. You seek to end the things I love.” it asked. “There is no need to hasten that end,” Vin said. “No reason to force it.” Ruin said, seeming to flow around her. She could feel its touch on her—wet and delicate, like mis...
Modern romance, like Greek tragedy, celebrates the mystery of dismemberment, which is life in time. The happy ending is justly scorned as a misrepresentation; for the world, as we know it, as we have seen it, yields but one ending: death, disintegrat...
...This fear was unbearable. It unwrapped who she was, as neatly as he'd unwound her bandage, leaving too much pain and ugliness exposed. Nerve endings; he'd said they were the problem [causing phantom pain in the amputated limb]." Things that cut of...
David Foster Wallace: Because I'd like to be the sort of person who can enjoy things at the time instead of having to go back in my head and enjoy them then.
My story ended where so many stories have ended since the Rising: with a man—in this case, my adoptive brother and best friend, Shaun—holding a gun to the base of my skull as the virus in my blood betrayed me, transforming me from a thinking huma...
Most friendships, if the end at all, end not by earthquake, but by erosion. Your time together, which you used to take for granted, becomes something you need to schedule. Slowly you're aware that the easy intimacy you shared got lost somewhere. You ...
Although churches seem the most natural space to perform spiritual awakening, the disconcerting reality is that many people in Western society see churches more as museums of religion than sacred stages that dramatize the movement of God's spirit.
If you decide to just go with the flow, you'll end up where the flow goes, which is usually downhill, often leading to a big pile of sludge and a life of unhappiness. You'll end up doing what everyone else is doing.
Such elusive puzzles recall the historian's basic dilemma: the absence of evidence does not always signify evidence of absence. In the end, we will likely never know.
He well knew his mind's natural tendency to be endlessly on a thousand subjects at once, to flit from this to that and to the next thing to no particular purpose--indeed, he called it his "butterfly mind.
Yet how could I not have believed Hitler a genius and unique when every day I saw and heard how the major personalities of the Reich fawned over him and worshipped him with total devotion.
Think it over carefully. This is very important," I say, "because to believe something, whatever it might be, is the doing of the mind. Do you follow? When you say you believe, you allow the possibility of disappointment. And from disappointment or b...
Now for a good twelve-hour sleep, I told myself. Twelve solid hours. Let birds sing, let people go to work. Somewhere out there, a volcano might blow, Israeli commandos might decimate a Palestinian village. I couldn't stop it. I was going to sleep.
My world foreshortened, flattening into a credit card. Seen head on, things seemed merely skewed, but from the side the view was virtually meaningless--a one-dimensional wafer. Everything about me may have been crammed in there, but it was only plast...
I hadn't found out yet that mankind consists of two very different races, the rich and the poor. It took me ... and plenty of other people . . . twenty years and the war to learn to stick to my class and ask the price of things before touching them, ...
Death after all is only a matter of a few hours, a few minutes, but a pension is like poverty, it lasts a whole lifetime. Rich people are drunk in a different way, they can't understand this frenzy about security. Being rich is another kind of drunke...
A vision inspires, aligns, and directs. it says to other people, "here is what I am up to, come and play in my sandbox!
Never forget that there are only two philosophies to rule your life: the one of the cross, which starts with the fast and ends with the feast. The other of Satan, which starts with the feast and ends with the headache.
It appears - because it has been the case for twenty years - that every problem is solvable...that no matter how badly the world economy slumps there is a pain-free way out of it. Once the realization dawns that there is not, and that the pain will b...
He knows nothing about how this will all end, except that it will surely end. He tries to imagine himself into a future, somewhere past this point, but he cannot. There is nothing to do but to keep on existing, in this exact time and place. This is w...
