Every day God invites us on the same kind of adventure. It's not a trip where He sends us a rigid itinerary, He simply invites us. God asks what it is He's made us to love, what it is that captures our attention, what feeds that deep indescribable ne...
Based on the experience of history and civilization of mankind, which is more important for Muslims today, to no longer busy discussing the greatness that Muslims achieved in the past, or debating who first discovered the number zero, including the n...
Literature duplicates the experience of living in a way that nothing else can, drawing you so fully into another life that you temporarily forget you have one of your own. That is why you read it, and might even sit up in bed till early dawn, throwin...
When we refuse to work with our disappointment, we break the Precepts: rather than experience the disappointment, we resort to anger, greed, gossip, criticism. Yet it's the moment of being that disappointment which is fruitful; and, if we are not wil...
Because we were stranded together and because I stuttered, we read. there is no refuge so private, no asylum more sane. There is no facility of voices captured elsewhere so entire and so marvellous. My tongue was lumpish and fixed, but in reading, si...
She had that look a child has only a few times in its life, when the child has bettered her betters. The expression isn't smug, though adults often take it for smugness. It's something else. Maybe relief at having confirmed through personal experienc...
Ever since the beginning of the middle-class era, with its faith in progress, belief in progress has dominated the upbringing of children too. Childhood now came to be understood only as the preliminary stage on the way to the full personhood of the ...
It has taken me four years to figure this out. If we live long enough, we all will experience this. Don’t ever predetermine how you think that you should feel on an anniversary of a tragic event in your life, such as a death of a loved one, or on a...
Once you realize that life and love are not things you can possess but forces that emanate through us and through all creation, then you can begin to appreciate the miracle you are a part of. You can release the burden and appreciate what you have ha...
We know – it has been measured in many experiments – that children with strong impulse control grow to be better adjusted, more dependable, achieve higher grades in school and college and have more success in their careers than others. Success de...
At last I understood that the way over, or through this dilemma, the unease at writing about 'petty personal problems' was to recognize that nothing is personal, in the sense that it is uniquely one's own. Writing about oneself, one is writing about ...
Pain is a predator when we run from it, it will inevitably chase us down and catch us in its clutches. The goal isn't to wallow in the pain or to avoid it, but rather, to move through it. Pain only holds us hostage when we get stuck in it or try to r...
By appealing to his imagination, a pornographic novel brings the reader’s body into play; libertine fiction appeals only to his mind. The goal of the former is erotic pleasure, or rather the desire to experience erotic pleasure, which the pornograp...
Commodus: I think I understand my own people. Gracchus: Then perhaps Caesar will be so good as to teach us, out of his own extensive experience? Commodus: I call it love, Gracchus. The people are my children, I am their father. I shall hold them to m...
Elizabeth Bennet: Now if every man in the room does not end the evening in love with you then I am no judge of beauty. Jane Bennet: [giggles] Or men. Elizabeth Bennet: [laughs brightly] No, they are far too easy to judge. Jane Bennet: They're not all...
Otter: Let me give you a hint. She's got a couple of major-league yabbos. Boon: Beverly! Otter: No. But you're getting warmer. Here's another: "Oh God, Oh God, OH GOD!" Boon: Marlene! Don't tell me you're gonna pork Marlene Desmond! Otter: Pork? Boon...
She wanted to hurt him. Hurt him bad. But she knew that his heart would forgive. So she hurt his mind. The mind that doesn't forgive. It remembers, for a very long time. And that's what she wanted. For him to remember always. What it means to get hur...
Now I can broach the notion of suicide. It has already been felt what solution might be given. At this point the problem is reversed. It was previously a question of finding out whether or not life had to have a meaning to be lived. It now becomes cl...
There is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state with another, nothing more. He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness. We must have felt what it is to die, Morrel, tha...
A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a k...
Don't put down too many roots in terms of a domicile. I have lived in four countries and I think my life as a writer and our family's life have been enriched by this. I think a writer has to experience new environments. There is that adage: No man ca...
