But, as we know, even when the silver wears away and you’re left with copper, if you attend to it every day it has a gleam all its own.
When you're in what seems like an impossible situation and it looks sure that you're going to be overrun, you have to keep in mind that only half of what the enemy does is actually going to put him in...
Sometimes love is taken away unjustly, but not until the very end do you stop believing and then it is very bitter. It is bitter because somewhere within you the perfect standard still lives, the pure...
Nobody steals books except kleptomaniacs and university students. In most places you can leave a book on the street and come back for in the next day.
All great discoveries...are products as much of doubt as of certainty, and the two in opposition clear the air for marvelous accidents.
They had taken to the movement unlike anything he had ever seen, and he thought that should this venture of the Jews prove successful, the new state would be filled with dancers and musicians, but esp...
She was not quite as arresting in photographs as she was in the flesh, for her beauty was sprung directly from her soul, and proved that physical features count little unless they are illumined from w...
I saw how greatly he suffered the requirement of being clever. It separated him from his soul, and it didn’t get him anything other than a living.
The craftless anarchy of the Beat poets on the one hand, and the extreme control of Henry James on the other, suggest that for most human beings, just as both freedom and discipline are necessary in l...
In American military cemeteries all over the world, seemingly endless rows of whitened grave markers stand largely unvisited and in silence. The gardeners tend the lawns, one section at a time. Even a...
To cite Montaigne, Nature always gives us happier laws than those we give ourselves.125
What a place to put a city, right on the front line of absolute zero. No wonder a cow burned it down.
To the sight of the swallows dying in mid air, Alessandro was finally able to add his own benediction. Dear God, I beg of you only one thing. Let me join the ones I love. Carry me to them, unite me wi...
Though the house itself was a fortress, still, Isaac Penn had thought to make sure that anyone who did manage to break in would be kept busy. Thus the vault was not a vault but rather a solid plug of...
The shelf was filled with books that were hard to read, that could devastate and remake one's soul, and that, when they were finished, had a kick like a mule.
That’s writing, huh. What does it do? It’s like talking, but it makes no sound.
In fact, one might make the case that New York would not have shone without its legions of contrary devils polishing the lights of goodness with their inexplicable opposition and resistance.
I'm not afraid, Rafi said. Why not? If I die tomorrow it will have been useless to have been afraid today.
I don't have a system. Theology is a system. Not my theology. Then what is it? What is it? It's the overwhelming combination of all that I've seen, felt, and cannot explain, that has stayed with me an...
Guariglia, what happens when you let go, when your strength leaves you and you sink into darkness, when there's nothing that you or anyone else can do, no matter how desperate you are, no matter how y...