Free will,” she agreed, “our greatest gift, the thing that makes life worth living, in spite of all the anguish it brings.
Being known by everyone is not the same as being loved.
With lead he shaded love into the woman’s eyes.
In the beginning was the word. Before all else, the word. So we speak as if words matter, because they do.
Sometimes it seems that to exit this world, they must go through my heart, leaving me scarred and sore.
Dogs needed no words to console you. Dogs were the ultimate practitioners of the therapy of touch. Dogs knew and accepted the hard realities of life that human beings could not acknowledge until those obvious truths were exhaustively described with words, and even then there was often more bitter acknowledgment than humble acceptance.
She wasn’t clay in the hands of others; she was rock, and with her own determined hands, she could sculpt the person that she wanted to be.
When someone gives you a special gift, never treat it lightly. If you treat it like a treasure, then it’ll be one.
But the line between moral behavior and narcissistic self-righteousness is thin and difficult to discern.
A high degree of intelligence yes in no other creature in the natural world. That’s why nature shuns us and why we subconsciously hate her and seek to obliterate her. High intelligence leads to the concept of progress. Progress leads to nuclear weapons, bio-engineering chaos and ultimately to annihilation.
Our culture sentimentalizes children, and we forget one of the things that we should most remember from that time of our lives: Children know that this world can be hard on them, harder than it is on adults. They are physically weaker than adults, financially dependent, and in times of danger, nothing clarifies our thinking more than an awareness of our extreme vulnerability.
Sometimes you have to break a rule to save the system.
Dogs might love a place, as people do, but the only place they love beyond all others is the place where you are.
Power is living while others inevitably perish. Power is cool indifference to their suffering. Power is taking nourishment from the deaths of others, just as the mighty redwoods draw sustenance from the perpetual decomposition of what once lived, but lived only briefly, around them. This is also part of the philosophy of Edgler Foreman Vess.
They say that necessity is the mother of invention, but it is also the grandmother of desperation.
To believe in luck, you must believe that the universe is a roulette wheel and that instead of paying out to us what we have earned, it pays out only what it wishes. But it is not a spinning wheel of chance, it is a work of art, complete and framed by eternity. He said that because we live in time, we think that the past is baked and served and eaten, that the present is coming out of the oven in continuous courses, and that the future is not yet even in the mixing bowl. Any.
Daily I walk a high wire, always in danger of losing my balance. The essence of my life is supernatural, which I must respect if I am to make the best use of my gift. Yet I live in the rational world and am subject to its laws. The temptation is to be guided entirely by impulses of an otherworldly origin-but in this world a long fall will always end in a hard impact.
Every beautiful facade seemed to conceal rot and ruin that I could almost see.
She never had much in this life, but with the simplest things, she made her corner of the world as beautiful as any king’s palace. We may lack riches, but the greatest fortune is what lies in our hearts.
Patterns exist in our seemingly patternless lives, and the most common pattern is the circle.