Jung didn’t try to separate good and evil. He knew that both exist in every human heart. He called the propensity to evil the Shadow. And he believed that trying to deny or repress the Shadow is dange...
I’ve sometimes wondered whether human beings are like the universe itself, where 95 percent of what surrounds us is dark matter, and cannot be seen. The only way black holes can be detected is by the...
IF A MAN is forced to choose between the truth and his father, only a fool chooses the truth.
Greed, apathy, hubris—even loyalty—all demand payment in the end. Storms will always come, and men will always do evil in the shadow of some other word.
Frost’s The Death of the Hired Man ran through his overheated brain: Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.
For nothing is lost, nothing is ever lost. There is always the clue, the canceled check, the smear of lipstick, the footprint in the canna bed, the condom on the park path, the twitch in the old wound...
Deer were damn good swimmers, though not many people knew it.
Because I expected so little, Gaines's painting is startlingly powerul. A lank-haired blond woman with a hard face sits at akitchen table in the harsh light of a bare bulb. She's surrounded by dirty c...
The irrevocable events of our lives happen in seconds, sometimes fractions of seconds.
Something new every time. The sound of forest insects comes from the phone. Then the screen lights up with the green sweep of my backyard. Even from the kitchen counter, I can see Jet’s naked body sit...
Searching, revealing nothing. A few heads in the audience turn to me, wondering who could possibly have upset the equilibrium of the
Between us. That night I prayed like a man trying to polish coal
There’s nothing like a mystery to distract you from reality.
There’s nothing harder than fighting alone, with no one to keep you company in your foxhole.
The Terrible Truth is that brutality is part of human nature, and all the laws in the world can't neuter it.
Sometimes we think we are moving randomly. But random behavior is rare in humans. We are always spiraling around something, whether we see it or not, a secret center of gravity with the invisible powe...
Our actions have consequences that last long after us, entwining the present with the future in ways we cannot begin to understand.
Nothing frightens me more than the faith in my daughter’s eyes. How many men deserve that kind of trust? One by one, the mentors I’ve most admired eventually revealed chinks in their armor, cracks in...
My favorite book is The Mysterious Island. I order my books from a flimsy catalog the teacher hands out to every student in the class. Emil and the Detectives. White Fang. Like that. Money is tight fo...
My clearest memory of Ferriday is driving over to sit in the decaying old Arcade theater in 1978, because unlike Natchez’s conservative theaters, the Arcade was showing Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunte...