Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
And that, my friend, is how the world ends. On the edge of a precipice, with one foot over the edge, it stops, turns and goes back, leaving an empty earth of birds and insects, wind, rain and rusting weapons.
The questions asked at the end of lie are very simple ones: Did I love well? Did I love the people around me, my community, the earth, in a deep way? And perhaps, Did I live fully? Did I offer myself to life?
He was a killer, a thing that preyed, living on the things that lived, unaided, alone, by virtue of his own strength and prowess, surviving triumphantly in a hostile environment where only the strong survive.
I was once asked if I'd like to meet the president of a certain country. I said, "No, but I'd love to meet some sheepherders." The sheepherders, farmers and taxi drivers are often the most interesting people.
In determing "the right people," the good-to-great companies placed greater weight on character attributes than on specific educational background, practical skills, specialized knowledge, or work experience.
There are a lot of things we as individuals can't do much about. We can't solve global warming as individuals, or health care problems, but as individuals, most of us can get our kids reading. We can do that.
I grew up in a little Methodist church that was very rural, very community support-oriented, made up of great people who talked about love and grace and the spiritual experience, but only in rhetorical terms.
Irene Diamond's Fertile Ground is a provocative book. It stirs me to vigorous assent. It also triggers wide-eyed disbelief. . . . As it prods me to explosions of disagreement, it also provokes useful thought.
I would not know the thing I sought until I found it. It was both something within and something without myself. Within, it was like the buried memory of a name that will not come to the tongue for utterance.
Bangladesh is a world of metaphor, of high and low theater, of great poetry and music. You talk to a rice farmer and you find a poet. You get to know a sweeper of the streets and you find a remarkable singer.
If work is part of your identity, think very carefully before you give it up. Giving it up won't make you a better mother; it will make you less of the person you are; and that will make you less of a mother.
He also deeply distrusts vampires, as you had guessed yourself,” Bones added. “Aside from that, all I heard was enough repetitions of ‘how many chucks could a woodchuck chuck’ to make me want to stake myself.
If violent crime is to be curbed, it is only the intended victim who can do it. The felon does not fear the police, and he fears neither judge nor jury. Therefore what he must be taught to fear is his victim.
Australia has suffered a decade of drought, epic floods, a Category 5 cyclone, and a plague of locusts. But just because Aussies have the biggest carbon footprint in the world, it doesn't mean they're stupid.
After we were married, we were broke. Flat broke. Not only did we not have health insurance, we could barely keep a roof over our heads, let alone have the kind of coin to throw around on onesies and Pampers.
It is just as important to trust God as it is to obey Him. When we disobey God we defy His authority and despise His holiness. But when we fail to trust God we doubt His sovereignty and question His goodness.
We actually do generate some new cells, some new neurons. So in the case of trauma there is the potential for there to be some new neural development which gives the person the chance to create new circuitry.
There're things we keep hidden from one another. Things we hide from ourselves. Things that are kept hidden from us. And things no one knows. You always learn the damnedest things at the worst possible times.
I've realized there are far more efficient and devastating methods of disturbing people than merely sloshing around in the pigpen with obvious, profane, scatological, flat-brained, grade-school offensiveness.
As a child, I was an obsessive reader, as was everybody in my family all winter long with my father. I think I was only 8 when I read Edward Gibbon's 'The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.'
There are no new fundamentals. You've got to be a little suspicious of someone who says, "I've got a new fundamental." That's like someone inviting you to tour a factory where they are manufacturing antiques.
As for the historical inspirations I drew on in writing The Snow Queen, I suppose I would call them more cross-cultural inspirations, though they frequently involve past societies as well as present day ones.
These days too many of us seem inclined to cover our ears, close our eyes, and blindly follow the most narrow, conservative tenets of religion or else seek comfort in the ancient traditions of New Age ritual.
Grief, when it comes, is nothing we expect it to be. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.
I am not the same kind of Mormon girl I was when I was seven, eight, or eighteen years old. I am not an orthodox Mormon woman like my mother. I am an unorthodox Mormon woman with a fierce and hungry faith.
It is my experience that the world itself has a role to play in our liberation. Its very pressures, pains, and risks can wake us up -release us from the bonds of ego and guide us home to our vast true nature.
If you read the first page of one of my novels, I can guarantee that you will read the last one. This isn't just social commentary. This is also about writing good page-turners. I want people to keep reading.
The real power of a wolf isn't in its fearsome jaws, which can clench with fifteen hundred pounds of pressure per square inch. The real power of a wolf is having that strength, and knowing when not to use it.
The problem is that most people spend their lives looking but not truly seeing, or, as Sherlock Holmes, the meticulous English detective, declared to his partner, Dr. Watson, “You see, but you do not observe.
It was the sheer force of the letters themselves which brought forth the meaning, since the only link between the Sephirot of non-verbal Wisdom and verbal Intelligence was through the letters of the alphabet.
When you use Facebook, you're always logged in, and your identity and relationships - to others, to content, to apps and services - are assets Facebook can use to customize your experience (oh, and your ads).
You can never truly understand or help others, even in your own family, unless you first look thoroughly into your own life and deal with your own sins without compromise, excuses, or evasion (Matthew 7:1-5).
Make a point to continually search for a better way of doing things, even when things are going well, to ensure that a better alternative has not been overlooked and to keep your creative talents in practice.
Growth demands a temporary surrender of security. It may mean giving up familiar but limiting patterns, safe but unrewarding work, values no longer believed in, and relationships that have lost their meaning.
If you are leading others and you're lonely, then you're not doing it right. Think about it. If you're all alone, that means nobody is following you. And if nobody is following you, you're not really leading!
There was after all no mystery in the end of love, no mystery but the mystery of love itself, which was large certainly but as real as grass, as natural and unaccountable as bloom and branch and their growth.
The new ground that you form in your living is a new self, a new self that isn't at all of the middle ground, a lived-in self that has no need of middle ground. That new self makes unseen reality within seen.
So I'm an ace?' Will grinned. 'I'm flattered Halt, flattered. I had no idea you regarded me so highly.' Halt gave him a long-suffering look. 'I might have been more accurate to say a joker.' Whatever you say.
Ow!" said Horace as the Ranger's fingers probed and poked around the bruise. Did that hurt?" Halt asked, and Horace looked at him with exasperation. Of course it did," he said sharply. "That's why I said 'ow!
Dedicate your life to a cause that inspires you and also greatly serves others. Master plan your life. If you don't fill your day with high priorities, it will automatically become filled with low priorities.
I wouldn't like to see Cuba change in other ways. And the trouble is when Fidel [Castro] does go - I am sure he will at some stage. He will probably be replaced by some sort of Western capitalism, ultimately.
It's hard as hell to hold on to your dignity when the risen sun is too bright in your losing eyes, and that's what I was thinking about as we hunted for bad guys through the ruins of a city that didn't exist.
Patience, grasshopper," I counseled. "You don't want to seem overeager." "Right, that's why I said tomorrow," he said. "I want to see you again tonight. But I'm willing to wait all night and much of tomorrow.
I was struck by an awful thought, the kind that cannot be taken back once it escapes into the open air of consciousness; it seemed to me that this was not a place you go to live. It was a place you go to die.
I don't see a future where we're all taught by robots. The real life, physical experience of being in a classroom and having conversations with knowledgeable people is immeasurably valuable and irreplaceable.
When you're sitting down and you're blocked and you just start writing and something in your mind just clicks, you start seeing connections and so on, you really do feel like you're channeling something else.
It’s been a tough couple of years for condescending nerds. And if bookstores fall, Jon, America will be inundated with a wandering, snarky underclass of unemployable purveyors of useless and arcane esoterica.
I would argue that the management of creativity requires a skill set that's relatively different from the traditional management skill set that is appropriate to a large, complex, industrial-era organization.
Few know the joys that spring from a disinterested curiosity. It is like a cheerful spirit that leads us through worlds filled with what is true and fair, which we admire and love because it is true and fair.
Remember Graham Green's dictum that childhood is the bank balance of the writer? I think that all writers feel alienated. Most of us go back to an alienated childhood in some way or another. I know that I do.