As surely as I feel love and need for food and water, I feel love and need for God. But these feelings have nothing to do with Supramundane Males planning torments for those who don't abide by neocon...
When Peter renounced the world he grew up in and the people he grew up with, I believe it was an act exactly as heroic as that of a person who, finding himself prone to violent seasickness, renounces...
The man on the rock had pitched five outs in the losing game, and had given up two runs on a single. But he’d inherited loaded bases. The story of his life. The story of all our lives.
I said we aren’t here to fucking like Vietnamese things, we’re here to kill or be killed by them, and telling me to wander around looking for bright sides and good things is like telling me to hurry u...
Anyone too undisciplined, too self-righteous or too self-centered to live in the world as it is has a tendency to idealize a world which ought to be. But no matter what political or religious directio...
The Austrian writer Robert Musil summed up the Fanatic's great rhetorical advantage in just ten words: There is no truth which stupidity can't make use of.
Sinner' and 'saint' are waves of differing size and magnitude on the surface of the same sea. Each is a natural outcome of forces in the universe; each is governed by time and causation. Nobody is utt...
She might be all right, Freddy said. But she sure is dead.
Life is short. It's God's fault. Sorry.
Because sometimes happy songs will make sad people miserable, because they feel guilty that they aren’t happy, on top of the sadness. But a sad song talks to the part that hurts, says, Yeah I know, ye...
In a head-on collision with Fanatics, the real problem is always the same: how can we possibly behave decently toward people so arrogantly ignorant that they believe, first, that they possess Christ's...
I felt a rush of trust--felt that life might be not just tolerable but beautiful, if I could only remember to find the bare Present.
He reminded me of a kid in my first-grade class, Mikey. Mikey used to talk about his pencil at Show’n’Tell. It was a fat green pencil with the school’s name and district number stenciled on it. Every...
The only unfailing guide I’ve ever found through the innumerable blind alleys of my life as a writer, man, husband, father, citizen, steward, or believer, is the love burning in my heart. for me, pray...
Religious laws, in all the major religious traditions, have both a letter and a spirit. As I understand the words and example of Jesus, the spirit of the law is all-important whereas the letter, while...
I’m just saying that his card-burning would have meant far more, on the day he did it, if he hadn’t already incinerated his life.
I wish there really was such a thing as a Time-Clock Puncher, though. I wish some gigantic, surly, stone-fisted Soap Mahoney-type guy went around the world smashing every clock in sight till there wer...
I call hellfire a threat, Natasha said, and ‘love thy neighbor’ a value. But I believe in hell, or something close to it. I think hell is what we get right here on earth when people trade their spiri...
Hearing this, the woman skooched her legs around each other, jingled her bells, leaned toward Everett till their shoulders touched, and laughed and squirmed the sorts of laughs and squirms that Jehova...
But I finally concluded that it is an inalienable right of lovers everywhere to become temporarily worthless to the world, it may even be their duty.