The value of the student’s question is supreme. The best initial response to a question is not to answer it, per se, but to validate it, protect it, support it, and make a space for it. Like a blossom just emerging, a question is vulnerable and del...
I was finally tired of hiding behind bravado. My family had hurt me so many times that I had started to lie about my feelings to everyone. To Sarah. To Maddie. To Ethan. And to myself. I was like an iceberg, with ninety percent of my real feelings su...
He wants her in his bedroom. And not in that way — no girl has ever been in his bedroom that way. It is his private space, his sanctuary. But he wants Clary there. He wants her to see him, the reality of him, not the image he shows the world. He wa...
But this first clumsy attempt showed her that the imagination itself was a source of secrets: once she had begun a story, no one could be told. Pretending in words was too tentative, too vulnerable, too embarrassing to let anyone know. Even writing o...
What is home? My favorite definition is "a safe place," a place where one is free from attack, a place where one experiences secure relationships and affirmation. It's a place where people share and understand each other. Its relationships are nurtur...
One must consider that small children are virtually incapable of making much impact on their world. No matter what path taken as a child, survivors grow up believing they should have done something differently. Perhaps there is no greater form of sur...
Every single person is vulnerable to unexpected defeat in this inmost emotional self. At every moment, behind the most efficient seeming adult exterior, the whole world of the person's childhood is being carefully held like a glass of water bulging a...
I think you could fall in love with anyone if you saw the parts of them that no one else gets to see. I don't know, like if you followed them around invisibly for a day and you saw them crying in their bed at night or singing to themselves as they ma...
This week, Zuma was quoted as saying, 'When the British came to our country, they said everything we are doing was barbaric, was wrong, inferior in whatever way.' But the serious critique of Zuma is not about who is a barbarian and who is civilised. ...
My friend Richard Carrion, the CEO of Puerto Rico’s top bank, once shared a line with me that I’ll never forget: “Robin, nothing fails like success.” Powerful thought. Your business is most vulnerable when it’s most successful. Success actu...
Give all of us gathered here tonight the strength to remember that life is so very fragile. We are all vulnerable, and we will all, at some point in our lives... fall. We will all fall. We must carry this in our hearts... that what we have is special...
U.S. News Organizations observe the anniversary of September 11 with investigations about the nation’s continuing vulnerability to terrorism. First, the New York Daily News reports that two of its reporters carried box cutters, razor knives, and pe...
The same sensitivity that opens artists to Being also makes them vulnerable to the dark powers of non-Being. It is no accident that many creative people--including Dante, Pascal, Goethe, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Beethoven, Rilke, Blake, and Van Gogh--...
If you're thinking, 'Great! I just need to be a superhero to fight perfectionism,' I understand. Courage, compassion, and connection seem like big, lofty ideals. But in reality, they are daily practices that, when exercised enough, become these incre...
Great travel writing consists of equal parts curiosity, vulnerability and vocabulary. It is not a terrain for know-it-alls or the indecisive. The best of the genre can simply be an elegant natural history essay, a nicely writ sports piece, or a well-...
Oh, Lord Montgomery, what do you mean to do with me in this bedroom when you have me all alone? An innocent maiden, and unprotected? Is my virtue safe? 'I, ah- what?' 'I know you are a dangerous man. Some call you a rake. Everybody knows you are a de...
Last night I encountered a dream cat with a very long neck and a body like a human fetus, gray and transluscent. I don't know what it needs or how to provide for it. Another dream years ago of a human child with eyes on stalks. It is very small, but ...
Dissociation from the body and emotions – numbness – is a basic requirement of the male ideal. Hardy and Hough point out that the patriarchal culture’s influence is so strong on this point that it interferes with men ever recognizing that pain ...
When you’ve tired of me,” she said softly, precisely, “Apollo will still be my brother. Will still be there for me.” “I’ll never tire of you,” he said, knowing with every thread of his soul that he spoke the absolute truth. “Then prov...
What drew him back was something altogether more personal, to a history where, in the pain and longing of adolescence, he was still standing on the corner of Queen and Albert Streets waiting for someone that he knew would never appear. He had long un...
The day the earth-moving machines arrived, it was as if aliens had invaded Earth. Overnight they appeared, diggers with huge scoops, plodding their slow and ancient ways across the landscape. By the next week they had multiplied and evolved into dive...
