Good words were the difference between Emily eating well and not. And what she had found worked best were not facts or arguments but words that tickled people’s brains for some reason, that just amuse...

For the rest of his life, Oliver Twist remembers a single word of blessing spoken to him by another child because this word stood out so strikingly from the consistent discouragement around him.

Fawkes is a phoenix, Harry. Phoenixes burst into flame when it is time for them to die and are reborn from the ashes.

Evidence indicates that cats were first tamed in Egypt. The Egyptians stored grain, which attracted rodents, which attracted cats. (No evidence that such a thing happened with the Mayans, though a num...

Evening prayerI spend my life sitting, like an angel in a barber's chair,Holding a beer mug with deep-cut designs,My neck and gut both bent, while in the airA weightless veil of pipe smoke hangs.Like...

Emma cites the structure of the [Eating Disorder] Unit as being important to her decision to disengage from her illness, and the fact that she felt safe in it, and cared for.'It was the first time I'd...

Do you know the hallmark of a second rater? It's resentment of another man's achievement. Those touchy mediocrities who sit trembling lest someone's work prove greater than their own - they have no in...

Community as discipline is the effort to create a free and empty space among people where together we can practice true obedience.

Can you think what the Mirror of Erised shows us all? Harry shook his head.Let me explain. The happiest man on earth would be able to use the Mirror of Erised like a normal mirror, that is, he would l...

Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them, at all. The magic is only in what the books have to say, how th...

Between 1882 and 1968, more black people were lynched in MIssissippi than in any other state.

Because human beings lived then in a world in which physical strength was the mostimportant attribute for survival; the physically stronger person was more likely to lead.And men in general are physic...

As a rule, theologians know nothing of this world, and far less of the next; but they have the power of stating the most absurd propositions with faces solemn as stupidity touched by fear.It is a part...

Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pound ought and six, result misery.

Annette sighs. Manfred's been upgrading this robot cat for years, and his ex-wife Pamela used to mess with its neural configuration, too: This is its third body, and it's getting more realistically un...

And again Harry understood without having to think. It did not matter about bringing them back, for he was about to join them. He was not really fetching them: They were fetching him.

And Sarah still looked like the sexiest librarian on earth, which is as those of you who frequent libraries know means very sexy indeed, but with that added owlish touch that drives you wild.

And I’m looking through the glass Where the light bends at the cracks And I’m screaming at the top of my lungs Pretending the echoes belong to someone — Someone I used to know.

Adolf Hitler is probably the last of the great adventurer-conquerors in the tradition of Alexander, Caesar and Napoleon, and the Third Reich the last of the empires which set out on the path taken ear...

8 second hug: Yes, eight seconds is a long time, and no, I am not recommending giving everyone an eight second hug. The shell we put up or mask we hide behind is made up of what we think logically thi...