Intense, unexpected suffering passes more quickly than suffering that is apparently bearable; the latter goes on for years and, without our noticing, eats away at our souls, until, one day, we are no longer able to free ourselves from the bitterness ...
The boy could see in his father's gaze a desire to be able, himself, to travel the world—a desire that was still alive, despite his father's having had to bury it, over dozens of years, under the burden of struggling for water to drink, food to eat...
Yet people are still showing up to lift their hands after all these years even though the church is flawed and broken and beautiful and has a shameful, ugly side to it that I'll bet it wishes it didn't have and repeatedly tries to hide. Just like me....
He sweeps her hair back from her ears; he swings her above his head. he says she is his émerveillement. He says he will never leave her, not in a million years.
Musicians have always had a better understanding of love than the rest of us. Over the years they have told us that love: is like a rock, is here to stay, is all you need, will find a way, will keep us together, will tear us apart, sucks.
The price the Virgin demanded was purity, and the way the educators of Catholic children have interpreted this for nearly two thousand years is sexual chastity. Impurity, we were taught, follows from many sins, but all are secondary to the principal ...
The mass hallucination of the twentieth century is this: that all these national governments, which each year kill or threaten way more humans than they protect, and take a big chunk of your income to do so, are for some reason a great idea, an inevi...
If you can figure out how to choose happiness in your marriage daily, and stop sweating the small stuff, it'll take ten years off your life.
Trust is tough. Once trust has been broken by multiple people on multiple occasions, believing in anyone or anything becomes increasingly difficult. Much of the skepticism of our world can be traced back to broken trust.
If anything, global response to the Rising only confirmed something that many Australians had quietly believed for quite some time: If forced to live in Australia for a year, most of the world’s population would simply curl up in a fetal ball and d...
Few of us would regret the years it takes to complete an education or master a crucial skill. So why complain about the perseverance needed to become a well-balanced and truly compassionate human being?
Now, you two – this year, you behave yourselves. If I get one more owl telling me you've – you've blown up a toilet or –" "Blown up a toilet? We've never blown up a toilet." "Great idea though, thanks, Mum.
Gracie: You have an unusual house. Have you lived here long? Bobby Tom: A couple of years. I don't much like it myself, but the architect is real proud of it. She calls it urban Stone Age with a Japanese Tahitian influence. I sort of just call it ugl...
The misfortune of a young man who returns to his native land after years away is that he finds his native land foreign; whereas the lands he left behind remain for ever like a mirage in his mind. However, misfortune can itself sow seeds of creativity...
New Englanders began the Revolution not to institute reforms and changes in the order of things, but to save the institutions and customs that already had become old and venerable with them; and were new only to a few stupid Englishmen a hundred and ...
It's the silliness--the profligacy, and the silliness--that's so dizzying: a seven-year-old will run downstairs, kiss you hard, and then run back upstairs again, all in less than 30 seconds. It's as urgent an item on their daily agenda as eating or s...
But nearly every woman I know has a roughly similar story - in fact, dozens of them: stories about being obsessed with a celebrity, work colleague or someone they vaguely knew for years; living in a parallel world in their head; conjuring up endless ...
I had a dream about you. I watched you grow up, and though I enjoyed the whole process, it did get pretty uncomfortable sitting in the tree holding those binoculars all those years.
I guess that's the lesson in all of this-not to be eighty years old, looking back on your life, wondering if you made the right choice or how your life might have been different if you'd done one thing and not another.
They were obviously headstones of graves, though the graves themselves no longer existed as either mounds or depressions; the years had leveled all. Scattered here and there, more massive blocks showed where some pompous or ambitious monument had onc...
For the first time in four billion years a living creature had contemplated himself and heard with a sudden, unaccountable loneliness, the whisper of the wind in the night reeds.
