The plaque the Romans placed above Jesus's head as he writhed in pain—"King of the Jews"—was called a titulus and, despite common perception, was not meant to be sarcastic. Every criminal who hung on a cross received a plaque declaring the specif...
It's Simon. He's missing." "Ah," said Magnus, delicately, "missing what, exactly?" "Missing," Jace repeated, "as in gone, absent, notable for his lack of presence, disappeared." "Maybe he's gone and hidden under something," Magnus suggested. "It can'...
But once upon a time - that would be our time - a telephone cord seemed like nothing less than a lifeline. It was your attachment to the outside world and, even more than that, your attachment to the people you loved, or wanted to love, or tried to l...
But what struck me was the book-madness of the place--books lay scattered across the unmade bed and the top of a battered-looking desk, books stood in knee-high piles on the floor, books were crammed sideways and right side up in a narrow bookcase th...
The world' is man's experience as it appears to, and is moulded by, his ego. It is that less abundant life, which is lived according to the dictates of the insulated self. It is nature denatured by the distorting spectacles of our appetites and revul...
Kevin looks at me and I know he isn’t seeing the little girl I use to be, all pigtails and gangly limbs. He isn’t seeing my mother’s daughter or even my mother anymore. As his eyes linger over me, stopping here and there in the most uncomfortab...
What is this spirit in man that urges him forever to depart from happiness and security, to toil, to place himself in danger, even to risk a reasonable certainty of death? It dawned upon me up there in the moon as a thing I ought always to have known...
And maybe one winter it will get too cold and I’ll forget about the summers we once shared. My family portrait might fold in too, producing the same horrific effect as Jeremy’s: that I, all along, had another sibling who eclipsed and became me—...
Every time the song looped, all I heard was the part about the lies - and how they weigh you down. Tonight, as I drive toward Detroit in my Jeep, I know what those words really mean. It's not just the lies they're referring to. It's life. You can't r...
You see all the other fellows were so active and earnest and all that sort of thing- always rampaging, and skirmishing, and scouring the desert sands, and pacing the margin of the sea, and chasing knights all over the place, and devouring damsels, an...
Like so many of the other books I read, it never seemed to me like a book, but like a place I had lived in, had visited and would visit again, just as all the people in them, every blessed one – Anne of Green Gables, Heidi, Jay Gatsby, Elizabeth Be...
Arab nationalism in its traditional form was the way in which secular Arab Christians like Edward had found and kept a place for themselves, while simultaneously avoiding the charge of being too 'Western.' It was very noticeable among the Palestinian...
Barefoot conducts his seminars on his houseboat in Sausalito. It costs a hundred dollars to find out why we are on this Earth. You also get a sandwich, but I wasn't hungry that day. John Lennon had just been killed and I think I know why we are on th...
...Bhutan all but bases its identity upon its loneliness, and its refusal to b assimilated into India, or Tibet, or Nepal. Vietnam, at present, is a pretty girl with her face pressed up against the window of the dance hall, waiting to be invited in; ...
The uniqueness in you makes you special and different. If you improve on it. If you learn to master it. Don't try being someone else. You can end up in places you never thought they exist. Be the original you don't fake it. Then you will make it. @tr...
Mickey: I told you to stay behind. Martha: You looked like you needed help. Besides, you're the one who persuaded me to go freelance. Mickey: Yeah, but— we're being fired at by a Sontoran. A dumpling with a gun. And this is no place for a married w...
You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down again. So why bother in the first place? Just this: What is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above. One climbs, one sees. One descends, one sees no longer,...
Traveling is a fool's paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and ...
...The world was really one bee yard, and the same rules work fine in both places. Don't be afraid, as no life-loving bee wants to sting you. Still, don't be an idiot; wear long sleeves and pants. Don't swat. Don't even think about swatting. If you f...
On the Ning Nang Nong Where the Cows go Bong! And the Monkeys all say Boo! Theres a Nang Nong Ning Where the trees go Ping! And the tea pots Jibber Jabber Joo On the Nong Ning Nang All the Mice go Clang! And you just cant catch em when they do! So it...
But something-luck, fate, conspiracy, whatever you want to call it-has thrown us together." He leaned forward, his gaze never leaving her face. "Of all the crazy places in the world, here we are, at the same table, in the same dirty Vietnamese cafe. ...
