The vast majority of the populace would never think of setting themselves any deadlines for the achievement of their dreams. They may have a vague notion they will get older and that one day they will probably die, but it all seems a long way away, a...
I felt like a mouse running through one of those cardboard mazes. I didn't have to think about anything I did. My body just...went. The difference was that, unlike the mouse, there was no hunk of cheese waiting for me at the end. No reward of any kin...
I had to have company -- I was made for it, I think -- so I made friends with the animals. They are just charming, and they have the kindest disposition and the politest ways; they never look sour, they never let you feel that you are intruding, they...
You can't hurt me the way you think you can. But even if you could? I would rather die with the taste of you on my tongue than live and never touch you again. I'm in love with you, Mara. I love you. No matter what you do.
One of the protestor's sign catches my eye. HOMISEXUALITY IS THE DEVIL'S WORK, it says. And once again I think about how people use the devil as an alias for the things they fear. The cause and effect is backward. The devil doesn't make anyone do any...
Josiah became King of Judah at the age of eight. Joan of Arc led the French Army at nineteen. King Tut led all of Egypt at age nine. Age isn't everything you think it is. Your heart and your spirit speak more than a simple candle count on your birthd...
But many intelligent people have a sort of bug: they think intelligence is an end in itself. They have one idea in mind: to be intelligent, which is really stupid. And when intelligence takes itself for its own goal, it operates very strangely: the p...
But at some point you have to make peace with what you were given and if God wanted me to be a shy girl with think, dark hair, He would have made me that way, but He didn't. Useful, then, might be to accept how I was made and embody myself fully ther...
Sadness and boredom were more bearable than the effort of living a normal life. Perhaps the idea of death began to hover over her during that period, as a kind of higher order of lassitude in which she would not have to move the blood in her veins or...
I think now that this is the great division between people. There are people who find life hard and those who find it easy. There are those who have a natural, in-built, expectation of happiness, and there are those who feel that happiness is not to ...
When I get lonely these days, I think: So BE lonely, Liz. Learn your way around loneliness. Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. Welcome to the human experience. But never again use another person's body or emotions as a scratching p...
I don’t want to be that girl who’s nothing without her boyfriend. I want to be a reflection of what I love—of who I am on my own, not just an empty echo of who I love. Does that make sense?” “You think I’d overwhelm you?” he asked. “W...
Ilse and I hunted all over the old orchard today for a four-leaved clover and couldn't find one. Then I found one in a clump of clover by the dairy steps tonight when I was straining the milk and never thinking of clovers. Cousin Jimmy says that is t...
Folks say I've never been quite right since - but they only say that because I'm a poet, and because nothing ever worries me. Poets are so rare in Blair Water folks don't understand them, and most people worry so much, they think you're not right if ...
You tell them one real thing and then the doctor thinks he knows you. He starts getting arrogant and overfamiliar, making insulting suggestions left and right. You have to protest constantly just to set the record straight. Finally he makes offensive...
A basic theme for the anarch is how man, left to his own devices, can defy superior forces – whether state, society, or the elements – by making use of their rules without submitting to them. ‘It is strange,’ Sir William Parry wrote when desc...
Now for God's sake, will you two start behaving like a princess and a Courier?" Halt told them. "If you don't, I'll have to think about sending Will home.' 'Me?' Will said, his voice breaking into a high-pitched squeak of indignation. 'What's it got ...
Mrs. Horowitz said, "It is inexcusable that humans think they can murder other animals because they murder themselves. I must tell you, I hate humans. They terrify me." "They should," I continued. "I interviewed Yehudi Menuhin the other day.
You can spend all day trying to think of some universal truth to set down on paper, and some poets try that. Shakespeare knew that it's much easier to string together some words beginning with the same letter.
Faith?” The word popped out before I could think about it. “Faith in what? A higher power? The gods? The universe?” My voice cracked at the end, and I realized what this whole thing had done to my faith, if I’d had any to begin with. I realiz...
Said by Colin the dragon: "It's somewhat bizarre to learn that many of you (humans)think that other humans are somehow different enough to be hated and killed, when in reality you're all all tiresomely similiar in outlook, needs and motivation, and d...
