I learned about religion the way most children learned about sex, [in the schoolyard]. . . . They terrified me by telling me there was a dead man in the sky watching everything I did and I retaliated by explaining where babies came from. Some of thei...
Children are like geniuses, only smarter. Ocala has more creative kids than any other city named Ocala. That’s scientific, because there is only one city named Ocala, and it was named after a city not named Ocala. It’s true! It was named after ...
There are different kinds of love, Sarah. I feel one kind of love for your father. A special kind. Another kind for Warren. And still a different kind for you children.' She smiled at me. 'Heaven rue the day we can't feel love for one another. I woul...
We worship…the powers that speak to our souls, if it seems they do. We do so knowing there is more to the world, and the half-world, and perhaps worlds beyond, than we can grasp. We always knew that. We can’t even stop children from dying, how wo...
Why do people stay together? Putting aside ‘for the sake of the children’, and ‘the habit of years’ and ‘economic reasons’ as lawyers’ nonsense – it’s not much more – if one really does try to find out why it is that people don’...
It is as hard for our children to believe that we are not omnipotent as it is for us to know it, as parents. But that knowledge is necessary as the first step in the reassessment of power as something other than might, age, privilege, or the lack of ...
Time can do all sorts of things. It’s almost like a magician. It can turn autumn into spring and babies into children, seeds into flowers and tadpoles into frogs, caterpillars into cocoons, and cocoons into butterflies. And life into death. There�...
The throbbing engines of the ship and its relentless passage onwards through the sea brought back to us the ever urgency of moving Time, and then we knew that neither they nor we would would ever find again on earth such happiness and full content of...
When I call to mind my earliest impressions, I wonder whether the process ordinarily referred to as growing up is not actually a process of growing down; whether experience, so much touted among adults as the thing children lack, is not actually a pr...
You and your siblings are the most precious part of my life. And of all my children, you have the most potential to go anywhere you wish in this world – your test scores and grades have always been among the highest of your peers. But it’s clear ...
My plans for the future are to serve more and better, to worry less about the things that are unimportant, to let my wife and children know how much I love them, to openly support whatever I can see is good, to appreciate and to encourage everyone in...
On no subject are our ideas more warped and pitiable than on death. ... Let children walk with nature, let them see the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity, as taught in woods and meadows, plains and m...
The only thing Jess really cared about were those two children and letting them know they were okay. Because even if the whole world was throwing rocks at you, if you had your mother at your back, you'd be okay. Some deep-rooted part of you would kno...
The process of spreading a philosophy by means of free discussion among thinking adults is long and complex. From Plato to the present, it has been the dream of social planners to circumvent this process and, instead, to inject a controversial ideolo...
The land belongs to the future, Carl; that's the way it seems to me. How many of the names on the county clerk's plat will be there in fifty years? I might as well try to will the sunset over there to my brother's children. We come and go, but the la...
We seem to feel as though the life our children have -- that we have built for them -- is just a delicate house of cards, held together by the most intricate balancing of all its carefully selected components, and that the slightest shock, the slight...
All these things we do bespeak a terrible anxiety: that our children simply will not be able to make it through life if we do not perform totemic acts to keep them on the path toward self-perfection and keep their lives pure and unfettered by distrac...
Saint Thomas Aquinas says, wisely, that the only way to drive out a bad passion is by a stronger good passion. The same is true of thoughts as of passions. When your mind wanders, like a child, your will must bring it back, like a mother. [. . .] The...
Transform us, by your mercy and grace, into children who are more thankful for your kindness, more humble under your correction, more watchful against temptation, more eager to serve you. Give us hearts overflowing with joy in you and lips that boast...
It pleased Aliena that they were all together: she and Jack and their children, and Jack's mother, and Aliena's brother, and Martha. It was quite like an ordinary family, and Aliena could almost forget that her father had died in a dungeon, and she w...
Helplessness and anger make for predictable behavior: Children are certain to shove each other and pull hair, teenagers will call each other names and cry, and grown women who are sisters will say words so cruel that each syllable will take on the fo...
