The body is transmuted into other forms, worms batten on it, it helps to feed the grass, and some animal consumes the grass. But as for the survival of the individual spirit of a man, show me one tittle of scientific evidence to support it. Besides, ...
Love is a word that is overused these days, due to other lesser feelings often being mistaken for it. Infatuation, admiration, and attraction can pose as love, and can sometimes overwhelm us and fool us into thinking that we have found the real thing...
Nationality is a good thing to a certain extent, but universality is better. All that is best in the great poets of all countries is not what is national in them, but what is universal. Their roots are in their native soil; but their branches wave in...
Failure is just part of the process, and it's not just okay; it's better than okay. God doesn't want failure to shut us down. God didn't make it a three-strikes-and-you're-out sort of thing. It's more about how God helps us dust ourselves off so we c...
(From the Author Note at the beginning of the book.) Dorothy L. Sayers used to say that mystery stories were the only moral fiction of the modern world--because in a mystery, you were guaranteed to see that the bad got punished, the good got rewarded...
Tell me when it's over " Thalia said. Her eyes were shut tight. The statue was holding on to us so we couldn't fall but still Thalia clutched his arm like it was the most important thing in the world. "Everything's fine " I promised. "Are... are we v...
Modern prophets say that our economics have failed us. No! It is not our economics which have failed; it is man who has failed-man who has forgotten God. Hence no manner of economic or political readjustment can possibly save our civilization; we can...
The education of youth belongs to the priests, yet they do not take so much care of instructing them in letters, as in forming their minds and manners aright; they use all possible methods to infuse, very early, into the tender and flexible minds of ...
Whenever I listen to an artist or an art historian I'm struck by how much they and how much they --and how much I don't. Good art writing should therefore do at least two things. It should teach us how to look: at art, architecture, sculpture, photog...
Guns, double-crosses, hitmen… I can get used to a lot of things, but I’m never going to get used to sleeping where apocalypse bugs mate,” Wednesday said, walking into the room looking around. She dropped her Birkin on the floor and heard someth...
I believe in fiction and the power of stories because that way we speak in tongues. We are not silenced. All of us, when in deep trauma, find we hesitate, we stammer; there are long pauses in our speech. The thing is stuck. We get our language back t...
We're not gods, Julia. We're helpers. That's all. People have called us terrible things in the past. But that was only because they didn't understand us. That understanding is for the future, a time not long from now. You may live to see it. Then per...
Together the magicks swirled and danced around us, invisible but tangible, like an breeze. This wasn't defensive or offensive magic. It wasn't used to gather information, for strategy or diplomacy, or to fight a war against supernatural enemy. It sim...
We can not, therefore, reserve as sacred anything that is not truth and yet we cannot turn from things of truth have inspired us in our everyday lives. We must merely embrace both hard and soft truths that must not be avoided. This does not mean we c...
The daily circumstances of life will afford us opportunities enough of glorifying God in trust, without our waiting for any extraordinary calls upon faith, our faith. Let us remember that the extraordinary circumstances of life are but few; that much...
The only thing that gets you through is the firm, unbreakable belief that you have something special to offer. It's why people like Jack Nicholson make it when they're 30 and become one of the greatest actors to ever live. I'm sure when he was 21 som...
The woods that I loved as a child are entirely gone. The woods that I loved as a young adult are gone. The woods that most recently I walked in are not gone, but they’re full of bicycle trails. And this is happening to the world, and I think it is ...
Sometimes, Soraya Sleeping next to me, I lay in bed and listened to the screen door swinging open and shut with the breeze, to the crickets chirping in the yard. And I could almost feel the emptiness in Soraya's womb, like it was a living, breathing ...
Literature is love. I think it went like this: drawings in the cave, sounds in the cave, songs in the cave, songs about us. Later, stories about us. Part of what we always did was have sex and fight about it and break each other’s hearts. I guess t...
Tolerance is an attitude of reasoned patience toward evil … a forbearance that restrains us from showing anger or inflicting punishment. Tolerance applies only to persons … never to truth. Tolerance applies to the erring, intolerance to the error...
Allowing attachments to people/things create a compulsive addiction in us to be controlling. This “control” (fueled by fear of loss) fools us into a false sense of security and love. At first glance, it is common to confuse the idea of Conscious ...