Everything's gonna be fine. Stay optimistic. If there's dark clouds coming, they'll leave again. They always do. The world is round. Everything is round. The biggest invention of all time, the wheel, is round. Things pass, nothing will stay the same ...
We need our children to get onto the reading ladder: anything that they enjoy reading will move them up, rung by rung, into literacy. (Also, do not do what this author did when his 11-year-old daughter was into RL Stine, which is to go and get a copy...
It is a peculiarity of knitters that they chronically underestimate the amount of time it takes to knit something. Birthday on Saturday? No problem. Socks are small. Never mind that the average sock knit out of sock-weight yarn contains about 17,000 ...
Mmm.” Sebastian moaned. “It’s so delicious.” He laughed then. “It’s not the Poisonous Desert; it’s the Oreo Desert.” He scooped up handfuls of dirt and stones and funneled it into his mouth. He licked his palms, his teeth grinding aga...
The Clown turned his powdered face to the mirror. "If to be fair is to be beautiful," he said, "who can compare with me in my white mask?" "Who can compare with him in his white mask?" I asked Death beside me. "Who can compare with me?" said Death, "...
The sense of tragedy - according to Aristotle - comes, ironically enough, not from the protagonist's weak points but from his good qualities. Do you know what I'm getting at? People are drawn deeper into tragedy not by their defects but by their virt...
Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us that everybody sees it differently. Some people say there are true things to be found, some people say all kinds of things can be proved. I don't believe them. The only thing for cert...
But what we did yesterday isn't ever really the point or the question.The question is, are you open, by virtue of your relationship with this new Lover of yours, to being challenged in new ways, invited in new ways, to participate in what God is doin...
War as a moral metaphor is limited, limiting, and dangerous. By reducing the choices of action to “a war against” whatever-it-is, you divide the world into Me or Us (good) and Them or It (bad) and reduce the ethical complexity and moral richness ...
I published that theory [of speciational evolution] in a 1954 paper…and I clearly related it to paleontology. argued that the fossil record is very incomplete because some species fossilize better than others... I noted that you are never going to ...
In the Ottoman times, there were itinerant storytellers called "meddah. " They would go to coffee houses, where they would tell a story in front of an audience, often improvising. With each new person in the story, the meddah would change his voice, ...
There is nothing in the world which an artist cannot recreate into something poetic, ennobling. And why do we read these things? They are not facts, they do not improve our business skills, our techniques in manufacturing goods, the management of a h...
Remain faithful to the earth, my brothers, with the power of your virtue. Let your gift-giving love and your knowledge serve the meaning of the earth. Thus I beg and beseech you. Do not let them fly away from earthly things and beat with their wings ...
I noticed that all the prayers I used to offer to God, and all the prayers I now offer to Joe Pesci, are being answered at about the same fifty percent rate. Half the time I get what I want, half the time I don't...Same as the four-leaf clover and th...
The moment we care for anything deeply, the world - that is, all the other miscellaneous interests - becomes our enemy. Christians showed it when they talked of keeping one's self "unspotted from the world;" but lovers talk of it just as much when th...
We doubt in others, what is in fact in ourselves. The skeletons in your own closet are the things that scare you the most about others; people who come from a background of lying are suspicious of lying in others and so on and so forth. The most trus...
Science fiction is a dialogue, a tennis match, in which the Idea is volleyed from one side of the net to the other. Ridiculous to say that someone 'stole' an idea: no, no, a thousand times no. The point is the volley, and how it's carried, and what s...
Complexity looks at simplicity and laughs at it for being too simple. But this is stupidity. Which is more valuable? The drop of pure rose oil or the cologne that mixes that one drop with many other things in order to make it affordable enough? It ta...
What multiplies is only up to us. Whether it is kindness that multiplies; or unkindness. Whether it is goodwill that multiplies; or bad intentions. Whether it is love that multiplies; or fear. Whether it is truth that multiplies; or doubt. What multi...
I could show fight on natural selection having done and doing more for the progress of civilization than you seem inclined to admit. Remember what risk the nations of Europe ran, not so many centuries ago of being overwhelmed by the Turks, and how ri...
To lose focus means to lose energy. The absolutely wrong thing to attempt when we've lost focus is to rush about struggling to pack it all back together again. Rushing is not the thing to do... Patience, peace and rocking renew ideas. Just holding th...
