Fantasy writing must be grounded in both truth and life experience if it is to work. It can be as inventive and creative as the writer can make it, a whirlwind of images and plot twists, but it cannot be built on a foundation of air. The world must b...
Things may need to stay in the darkness for some time. There is power in darkness: the power of gestation, deep dreaming, and the sweetness of night. However, sometimes darkness obscures our vision, making it difficult to see some of our very importa...
Nature is what we know. We do not know the gods of religions. And nature is not kind, or merciful, or loving. If God made me — the fabled God of the three qualities of which I spoke: mercy, kindness, love — He also made the fish I catch and eat. ...
It’s in our nature to want to watch our human frailties played out on a huge, epic canvas. Ancient societies had anthropomorphic gods: a huge pantheon expanding into centuries of dynastic drama: fathers and sons, star-crossed lovers, warring brothe...
...the social mould civilization fits us into have no more relation to our actual shapes than the conventional shapes of the constellations have to the real star-patterns. I am called Mrs. Richard Phillotson, living a calm wedded life with my counter...
I realised I was living in my own universe with lots of assistants. I didn't have a cell phone; I didn't know how to use a computer. Everybody was doing everything for me. So I left and moved to New York. It was the end of an era, and I must say I fo...
We bought a car years later, and they so generously offered us some of their crappy Bar-B-Que sauce,FREE for their buyers. We looked at it and thought, "This is nowhere as good as the giant box of chocolates and huge bouquet of flowers we got SPECIAL...
I would probably have to say that reading fiction — those stories fill the space that other people might use religious stories for. The bulk of what I know about human life I’ve gotten from novels. And I think the thing about novels that make the...
Sounds travel through space long after their wave patterns have ceased to be detectable by the human ear: some cut right through the ionosphere and barrel on out into the cosmic heartland, while others bounce around, eventually being absorbed into th...
Don’t you find it striking? The personality is constantly dying and it feels like continuity. Meanwhile, we panic about death, which we cannot ever experience. Yet it is this illogical fear that motivates our lives. We gore each other and mutilate ...
Books are almost as individual as friends. There is no earthly use in laying down general laws about them. Some meet the needs of one person, and some of another; and each person should beware of the booklover’s besetting sin, of what Mr. Edgar All...
The Conditioned Mind / shuts off magical vision and gnosis / gives up freedom, truth, real choices / loses sight of love, trust, and social coherence / loses touch with organic life, gives way to interference // risks personal wellbeing, peace of hea...
Fly (poem from the book Blue Bridge) Delicate, / butterfly winged, / we vainly push against the sky, / each trying to find our place. Yes, we are going to die, / let's not beat about the bush. / Maybe today, maybe tomorrow, / maybe even years from no...
Many, if not most, of the difficulties we experience in dealing with government agencies arise from the agencies being part of a fragmented and open political system…The central feature of the American constitutional system—the separation of powe...
All men are created equal.' That doesn’t mean we are born into equal circumstances, or have the same skills. What we do have in common, though, is the ability to apply ourselves to achieving that which we desire. Each of us has the capacity to drea...
Who has stopped worshiping us?" "Everyone in the old world," April said little harshly. "But of course they have, young woman. We left, didn't we? We came to Everworld. How can you expect people to worship a God they can't see from time to time?" "Ye...
Real connection (and if it's LOVE, then real love)--goes beyond those not-so-perfect and superficial and idiosyncratic things that simply make us individuals. The trust and longevity of a relationship between two individuals is established through ti...
When he died, I went about like a ragged crow telling strangers, "My father died, my father died." My indiscretion embarrassed me, but I could not help it. Without my father on his Delhi rooftop, why was I here? Without him there, why should I go bac...
I think most Christians hear these urgent calls to do more (or feel them internally already) and learn to live with a low-level guilt that comes from not doing enough. We know we can always pray more and give more and evangelize more, so we get used ...
The idea of our own rationality...was convincing to us only because we so wished to be convinced. To any impartial observer, could such a thing exist, the sham was patent. Emotion and instinct were the basis of all our decisions, our actions, everyth...
That deepest thing, that recognition, that knowledge, that sense of kinship began the first time I saw you,and it is the same now - only a thousand times deeper and tenderer. I shall love you to eternity. I loved you long before we met in this flesh....
