thought-provoking

Books can be dangerous. The best ones should be labeled __his could change your life_.

Challenge a person's beliefs, and you challenge his dignity, standing, and power. And when those beliefs are based on nothing but faith, they are chronically fragile. No one gets upset about the belief that rocks fall down as opposed to up, because all sane people can see it with their own eyes. Not so for the belief that babies are born with original sin or that God exists in three persons or that Ali is the second-most divinely inspired man after Muhammad. When people organize their lives around these beliefs, and then learn of other people who seem to be doing just fine without them--or worse, who credibly rebut them--they are in danger of looking like fools. Since one cannot defend a belief based on faith by persuading skeptics it is true, the faithful are apt to react to unbelief with rage, and may try to eliminate that affront to everything that makes their lives meaningful.

And thereLike I thought I knewAnd aint life a bitchWas his head on a silver platter

The stories themselves aren't what moves him now...What moves him are the shadowy people behind the stories, the workers weary from their days, gathering at night in front of a comforting bit of fire...The world then was no less terrifying than it is now, with our nightmares of bombs and disease and technological warfare. Anything held the ability to set of fear...a nail dropped in a the hay, wolves circling at the edge of the woods...

Futures can and do change, something as simple as you're supposed to turn right down a street one day... In your bones u know it, and yet for reasons no one understands, you decide to debunk fate and go left. Now instead of meeting your spouse of your dreams and having a house full of kids, you get flattened by an ice-cream truck and spend the next 5 years in physical therapy recovering from the injuries; or worse you die from it. And all cause you exercised free will and turned the opposite way on a whim.

And with a practice of writing comes a certain important integrity. A culture filled with bloggers thinks differently about politics or public affairs, if only because more have been forced through the discipline of showing in writing why A leads to B.

The way he was talking to me earlier_ makes me think he__ starting to feel like God__ the cosmic sadist again and he__ the marionette.___n other words, God__ just torturing him for the kick?__homas sighed and set his mostly untouched plate down. __omething like that.___hat__ not a healthy outlook.___e doesn__ feel loved right now, so it__ the natural one.

It was like trying to think about what he__ be thinking if he never existed. He wouldn__ be thinking about what he was thinking. He just wouldn__ exist. It wouldn__ hurt.

There had been something about the island that made the girls forget who they had been. All those rules and shalt nots. They were no longer waiting for some arbitrary grade. They were no longer performing. Waiting. Hoping. They were becoming. They were.

Is a dream the ultimate freedom, or the ultimate prison?

If we are interested in a writing life - as opposed to a writing career - then we are in it for the process and not the product - for the body of work and not for the quick hit of one well-realised piece.

The idiotic industry of an ant building his hill in the path of a glacier, and imagining that he is free.

No one has yet tested the pencilTo see how many words it can write

All motion is relative. Perhaps it is you who have moved away-by standing still

Once you are a butterfly,you can really love _ thekind of love that makes anew life. It__ better than allthe hugging caterpillars cando.

I have been quiet today because fear in my heart has been fighting with frustration in my brain, leaving little energy for my mouth.

That's gotta be one of the principles behind reality. Accepting things that are hard to comprehend, and leaving them that way.

Don't give yourself a limit and you may discover you don't have one.