I forgot how good it feels to be rooted. And to be rooted is not the same thing at all as being tied down. To be rooted is to say, here I am nourished and here will I grow, for I have found a place where every sunrise shows me how to be more than wha...
The world's a hard place, Danny. It don't care. It don't hate you and me, but it don't love us, either. Terrible things happen in the world, and they're things no one can explain. Good people die in bad, painful ways and leave the folks that love the...
What's a doctor, after all? A legitimized voyeur, a stranger whom we permit to poke fingers and even hands into places where we would not permit most people to insert so much as a finger-tip, who gazes on what we take most trouble to hide; a sitter-a...
These women who move through this landscape, holding themselves safe amid the terrible and sudden dangers, holding their limbs close to their bodies to lessen their profile, to lessen the places life can catch at them, and still maintaining movement,...
The workplace would allow parents to work part time, to share jobs, to take personal leaves to give birth, tend to a sick child, or care for a well one. As Delores Hayden has envisioned in Redesigning the American Dream, it would include affordable h...
What price are you willing to pay to see your church actively engaged in evangelism? Price? What do you mean by price? There is a cost for everything. One of the causes for evangelistic entropy is an unwillingness to count the cost of growth. If evan...
I took [Kate's] hand in mine, and felt her fingers squeeze back. And I thought: home. It took me completely by surprise. But I suppose that once you bid farewell to your first home, you're always looking for another—that place where you can feel ha...
It's irresponsible to think things are just going to work out because you believe things happen for a reason. I refuse to accept these things. I refuse to give in to that absurdity. You saw what happened in Lucille and you lived with Col all those ye...
But then fall comes, kicking summer out on its treacherous ass as it always does one day sometime after the midpoint of September, it stays awhile like an old friend that you have missed. It settles in the way an old friend will settle into your favo...
What would it hurt for me to give that homeless guy a couple bucks? Who the hell cares if he spends it on beer? Maybe beer is a step up for him from the harder stuff that knocked him onto the streets in the first place. Maybe, just maybe, he’s actu...
The more you put your arm around those that you might naturally look down on, the more you will love yourself. And the more you love yourself, the less need you’ll ever have to find fault or be better than others. And the less we all find fault or ...
We worked side by side building our sandwiches. Mine, just a few modest layers of meat and cheese, with a bit of lettuce for some added crunchiness; his, a Dagwood, piled high with turkey, ham, salami, lettuce, tomatoes, two kinds of cheese, and—we...
That was the way with Casaubon's hard intellectual labours. Their most characteristic result was not the 'Key to all Mythologies', but a morbid consciousness that others did not give him the place which he had not demonstrably merited - a perpetual s...
...education is the ability to retrieve information at will and analyze it. But you can't have higher-level learning- you can't analyze-without retrieving information.' And you can't retrieve information without putting the information in there in th...
I can't say for sure if I'm better off, since I have no way of knowing what would have been. I could have traveled to exotic places and kissed exotic men in the moonlight. Or I could have ended living alone in a dumpy apartment with the flesh eating ...
Indeed, I have observed one ingredient, somewhat necessary in a man’s composition towards happiness, which people of feeling would do well to acquire; a certain respect for the follies of mankind: for there are so many fools whom the opinion of the...
The subjects range from the pastoral (sniffing of the butt of a melon to tell if it's ripe. and almost romantically lush descriptions of lightening storms sweeping across fields on summer nights) to elaborations on the value of man's having a life of...
What he'd find there, of course, was up to Pete. But he was sure there were magicians in Tampico and leopard-skins and golden thrones in Juba. Dragons and pirates and white temples where magic dwelt. And best of all, the places he didn't know about y...
It’s crucial to practice self-empathy, for trust can’t be willed into existence. That didn’t work when our caregivers tried to impose their will on us, and it won’t work internally, either. Only when we can tap into a place of self-trust, wit...
You know, you’ve set a really bad precedent for first dates,” I said. “How is anyone ever going to top this?” I turned to him for the first time. He was watching me, not the scenery. “I brought you here because I wanted to see the look on y...
The Prince stood beside the timpanist to count his rests for him and see that he came in in the right place. I suppressed all the trumpet passages which were clearly beyond the players' grasp. The solitary trombone was left to his own devices; but as...
