Our culture doesn't seem to value competence as much as it used to. Now we seem to want to do and get everything as quickly as possible, which often leads to mediocre work and products. It seems to be the exception to find people at stores and busine...
We need an enemy to give people hope. Someone said that patriotism is the last refuge of cowards: those without moral principles usually wrap a flag around themselves, and the bastards always talk about the purity of the race. National identity is th...
My dad is dead. And as I type this, by the window, on the rainy day, I am alive, yes. I am living. But sometimes it doesn't feel like I am doing it fast enough, or hard enough, or all the way. And it is times like that when I can understand wanting a...
Sixty is heaven," she [bohemian Aunt Norma] told Jeanie as they sat having tea. "The world is done with you, you become to all intents and purposes invisible, particularly if you are a woman. I like to think of it as your third life. There's childhoo...
The path of awakening "All of your past selves are walking behind you, like a shadow, waiting for you to awaken fully. Waiting for you to return home. To the Oneness. To love, wisdom, silence and compassion. The child you once were is still with you....
Here’s the conundrum: We want to tell our stories! But if condensation is the language of wishes—especially the most verboten and destructive ones—the more you spell the story out, the less aesthetically charged it becomes. The question is whet...
Right at this moment, I only want silence. I believe that the end of life is silence in the love people have for you. I've actually been running through what people have said about the end. Religion says that the end is one thing, because it serves t...
Nicholas broke the seal and scanned the contents. He looked up at Marcus with a chuckle. “Why, it appears you may get your wish for perpetual bachelorhood after all. She wants to end your engagement.” Marcus started from his chair. “The hell sh...
Life is short and you die at the end of it. But everyone wants to have a sense of purpose for their life no matter how long or short that life is. There is no greater purpose than to have the courage to be a member of one's country's military and thu...
Much of modern preaching is anaemic, with the life-blood of God's nature absent from the message. Evangelists centre their message upon the man. Man has sinned and missed a great blessing. If man wants to retrieve his immense loss he must act thus an...
Ram. My lord constable, the armor that I saw in your tent to-night, are those stars or suns upon it? Con. Stars, my lord. Dau. Some of them will fall to-morrow, I hope. Con. And yet my sky shall not want. Dau. That may be, for you bear a many superfl...
I think that all women are witches, in the sense that a witch is a magical being. And a wizard, which is a male version of a witch, is kind of revered, and people respect wizards. But a witch, my god, we have to burn them. It’s the male chauvinisti...
Whenever a journalist wrote an article about him that was critical in nature... he would invite them to a meal and at first they assumed they were in trouble for being critical of him. But they soon learned after arrival at his house for a meal that ...
Women have married because it was necessary, in order to survive economically, in order to have children who would not suffer economic deprivation or social ostracism, in order to remain respectable, in order to do what was expected of women because ...
We can’t go from zero to sixty in a day or even a week when it comes to shifting our food-habit gears. We have to take baby steps, starting with an increasing awareness of our habits and a willingness to chip away at the ones that aren’t doing us...
In the first year of my grief, there were times when I felt like hiding my personal story of loss and other times when I wanted to wear a sign on my body that read "Be nice to me, I'm grieving," or "Don't tick me off; I've already got the world on my...
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 ...
I started writing because of a terrible feeling of powerlessness," the novelist Anita Brookner has said. The National Book Award winner Alice McDermott noted that the most difficult thing about becoming a writer was convincing herself that she had an...
What's to be believed? Or does it matter at all? When mass murder's been answered with mass murder, rape with rape, hate with hate, there's no longer much meaning in asking whose ax is bloodier. Evil, on evil, piled on evil. Was there any justificati...
There are a lot of valid reasons for wanting to feel safer. But hiding from pain or perceived threats behind a wall of weight is not the way to go about it. First of all, being a fat adult will never change the circumstances of anyone's childhood. Th...
I'd been surprised by the depth of emotion that was invested in that curiously archaic phrase 'great power'. What would it mean, I'd asked myself, to the lives of working journalists, salaried technocrats and so on if India achieved 'great power stat...
