For as long as I could remember, I had been transparent to myself, unselfconscious, learning, doing, most of every day. Now I was in my own way; I myself was a dark object I could not ignore. I couldn't remember how to forget myself. I didn't want to think about myself, to reckon myself in, to deal with myself every livelong minute on top of everything else - but swerve as I might, I couldn't avoid it. I was a boulder blocking my own path. I was a dog barking between my own ears, a barking dog who wouldn't hush. So this was adolescence. Is this how the people around me had died on their feet - inevitably, helplessly? Perhaps their own selves eclipsed the sun for so many years the world shriveled around them, and when at least their inescapable orbits had passed through these dark egoistic years it was too late, they had adjusted. Must I then lose the world forever, that I had so loved? Was it all, the whole bright and various planet, where I had been so ardent about finding myself alive, only a passion peculiar to children, that I would outgrow even against my will?

Rest in the knowledge that God is both abundantly gracious and ridiculously generous.

Children must early learn the the beauty of generosity. They are taught to give what they prize most, that they may taste the happiness of giving.

Generosity is the rarest of qualities in American writers.

It takes money to make money, even begging. Humans are herd animals. If a stranger__ bleeding to death beside the road, most people won__ stop to offer a Band-Aid. But get the ball rolling with a couple Good Samaritans, and before you know it you__e got more eager philanthropists than you know what to do with.

Rabbi Hiyya advised his wife, __hen a poor man comes to the door, be quick to give him food so that the same may be done to your children._ She exclaimed, __ou are cursing our children [with the suggestion that they may become beggars]._ But Rabbi Hiyya replied, __here is a wheel which revolves in this world._ __abylonian Talmud, Shabbat 151b