As the new work fills my notebooks, I've come to realize that the characters in my stories were so real because I really did want to get close to people, I really did want to know them. It was just easier to do it on paper, one step removed.
By the time Bones announced it was Tammy's turn, I'd fallen in love with him all over again. Flowers and jewelry worked for most girls as a romantic gesture, but here I was, misty-eyed at watching him show my mother how to stab the shit out of him.
Apparently unaffected, she rose. "Yeah, you're probably right. I should be going." She feigned a yawn. "You've gotta head back to work and I've gotta head to jail. Big night for me. I'm planning to shiv someone for a bar of soap. --
For most of her life she just expected things would work out, that people would be kind. Now she recognized her good fortune for what it was. She'd been lucky in so much, it had left her woefully unprepared for old age.
I recognized my work for what it was--as unimportant a drug as cigarettes to get one through the weeks and years. If we are extinguished by death, as I still try to believe, what point is there in leaving some books behind any more than bottles, clot...
One of the biggest problems with your average sales call is that the salesman doesn’t know what he is trying to achieve. He hasn’t worked out the end of the journey. So he sets off and just hopes he walks out with…something.
When everything is working out for you, it means you are in the wrong gym.
You were the one who changed us when you left me in the tree house; and you keep thinking that if you push hard enough, you can make everything go back to before that moment. It doesn't work that way. Give me a chance to choose you.
I think you have every right to cherry-pick when it comes to moving your spirit and finding peace in God. You take whatever works from wherever you can find it, and you keep moving toward the light.
Once the troublesome mind "begins to compose speeches and dream up arguments, especially if these are clever, it will soon imagine it is doing important work." But if you can surpass those thoughts, Teresa explained, and ascend toward God, "it is a g...
If, then, I were asked for the most important advice I could give, that which I considered to be the most useful to the men of our century, I should simply say: in the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.
Pritkin muttered something that sounded fairly vicious. “My clothes are warded! Even if I wished to accede to your demand, it would not work on them.” “Then strip.” “I beg your pardon?” He sounded almost polite suddenly, as if he believed...
The best investors are visionaries—they look beyond the present. By the same token, vision remains vision until you focus, do the work, and bring it down to earth where it will do some good.
If we were in a restaurant sometimes Orpheus would look sullen and wouldn't talk to me and I thought people felt sorry for me. I should have realized that women envied me. Their husbands talked too much. But I wanted to talk to him about my notions. ...
you're telling me that if i keep dropping bombs into a junkyard, someday all the pieces will blast together into a perfect Mercedes. that's what the big bang proposes. that's what evolution teaches. That chaos gave rise to perfection. But we know it ...
How could I have never told anyone what He had done for me? Nothing else had worked. Nothing had been able to break the chains that kept me living on the edge. Nothing....except the gentleness of His touch.
There exists only a mechanism by which meaning flows from intangible mind element into real event – and when you see that, all the postulated structures and cosmologies, built only of concepts, dissipate like yesterday’s weather.
If you picture other people as superior to yourself, you will realize that mental image. Putting a preacher, a saint, a prophet, an expert or anybody up on a pedestal in your personal view, fundamentally accomplishes nothing but the effect of putting...
Simply put, the relative age of a philosophical perspective has nothing to do with its veracity. It is pure illusion to imagine that just because a view of life was held and put to words long ago, that it is more valid.
Courage is a decision you make to act in a way that works through your own fear for the greater good as opposed to pure self-interest. Courage means putting at risk your immediate self-interest for what you believe is right.
But O the exceeding grace Of highest God, that loves his creatures so, And all his works with mercy doth embrace, That blessed angels, he sends to and fro, To serve to wicked man, to serve his wicked foe.
