Believe long ago had decided it was better to be first in Gaul rather than second in Rome.
Who can make sense of the roles we play? If I could draw any conclusion about the long, depressing slog of human progress, it’s the possibility that unseen elements lie just on the other side of the p...
When people make a contract with the devil and give him an air-conditioned office to work in, he doesn't go back home easily.
When I closed my eyes, a lantern lit up the inside of my head, as if I had punched a hypodermic loaded with morphine into my arm.
Wars of enormous importance are fought in places nobody cares about.
There may be room in government service for the altruist and the iconoclast, but I have yet to see one who was not treated as an oddity at best and at worst an object of suspicion and fear.
There are not many places left in the United States where people can get off the computer, stop filing tax returns, and in effect become invisible. The rain forests in the Cascades and parts of West M...
There are certain kinds of currency you acquire in life. Most of it is ephemeral. But friendship and faith in the unseen world and the commitment to be true unto thine own self are the human glue that...
The woman considered the wisest person in old New Orleans was a witch by the name of Marie LeVeau.
The false dawn, with its illusions and mist-wrapped softness, can be as inadequate and fleeting as Morpheus’ gifts.
She was one of those women who seemed to choose solitude and plainness over beauty, and anger over happiness.
Night Comes to the Cumberland.
Jolie Blon, the most haunting and unforgettable lament I have ever heard.
It has been my experience that most human stories are circular rather than linear. Regardless of the path we choose, we somehow end up where we commenced - in part, I suspect, because the child who li...
In a half hour I could kick open a furnace door and fling into the flames all the snakes and squeaking bats that lived inside me. Except the next morning they would writhe with new life in the ashes a...
If we break promises to God, shouldn't we be allowed an occasional violation of our word to our friends and superiors?
I still wanted to believe George Orwell’s admonition that people are always better than we think they are.
I read a poem once that had a line in it about a white radiance that stains eternity.
I had seen a dawn like this one only twice in my life: once in Vietnam, when a Bouncing Betty had risen from the earth on a night trail and twisted its tentacles of light around my thighs, and years e...
I could see the uncertainty, the fear about her job, her paycheck, her relationship with her boss, the prospect of offending people with power and authority over others, the dark figure sitting in the...