Suddenly I came out of my thoughts to notice everything around me again-the catkins on the willows, the lapping of the water, the leafy patterns of the shadows across the path. And then myself, walkin...
Not to know yourself is dangerous, to that self and to others. Those who destroy, who cause great suffering, kill off some portion of themselves first, or hide from the knowledge of their acts and fro...
No matter how deeply you come to know a place, you can keep coming back to know it more.
My friend Chip Ward speaks of the tyranny of the quantifiable, of the way what can be measured almost always takes precedence over what cannot: private profit over public good; speed and efficiency ov...
Memory, even in the rest of us, is a shifting, fading, partial thing, a net that doesn't catch all the fish by any means and sometimes catches butterflies that don't exist.
Marriage equality is a threat: to inequality. It's a book to everyone who values and benefits from equality. It's for all of us.
I wish that I could put up yesterday’s evening sky for all posterity, could preserve a night of love, the sound of a mountain stream, a realization as it sets my mind afire, a dance, a day of harmony,...
I was arguing not that everyone should read books by ladies—though shifting the balance matters—but that maybe the whole point of reading is to be able to explore and also transcend your gender (and r...
Go to hell, but keep moving once you get there, come out the other side.
Despair is a form of certainty, certainty that the future will be a lot like the present or will decline from it.
A year ago, I was at a dinner in Amsterdam when the question came up of whether each of us loved his or her country. The German shuddered, the Dutch were equivocal, the Brit said he was comfortable wi...
A path is a prior interpretation of the best way to traverse a landscape.
A lone walker is both present and detached, more than an audience but less than a participant. Walking assuages or legitimizes this alienation.
A Presbyterian pastor who had performed a number of such marriages told me, I remember coming to this realization when I was meeting with same-sex couples before performing their ceremonies when it wa...
I fear their false urgency, their call to speed, their insistence that travel is less important than arrival...
If the boundaries of the self are defined by what we feel, then those who cannot feel even for themselves shrink within their own boundaries, while those who feel for others are enlarged, and those wh...
Were revolutions ever really what we thought them to be?
Yes, people of both genders pop up at events to hold forth on irrelevant things and conspiracy theories, but the out-and-out confrontational confidence of the totally ignorant is, in my experience, ge...
What lies ahead seems unlikely; when it becomes the past, it seems inevitable.
What distinguishes a technological world is that the terms of nature are obscured; one need not live quite in the present or the local.