Ask BIG questions, find BIG answers.
The Queen has been guillotined, accused of crimes beyond imagining. Last night she appeared to me in a dream, handing me her head.
A feeling of disquiet continues to haunt me. As a youth one dreams of love; by the time one wakes, it is too late.
We are born, we live and we die - in the midst of the marvelous.
Daggers ever at the ready, I went about the day: children fed, linens mended, bedclothes aired. In little ways one conquers fear.
Splendid,' Abbé Patin said with a sheepish grin, pulling up alongside. 'There is nothing quite so thrilling as riding in fear of one's life.
Each moment of life is a step toward death.
The point with Buddhism is that it doesn't just tell you to be good, it tells you how. It doesn't just say, "Don't be angry," it shows us the methods to help us not to be angry. It gives techniques for everything that it advises us to cultivate, and all the negative qualities we need to overcome and transform.
The beginning and the end are never really the journey of discovery for me. It is the middle that remains a puzzle until well into the writing. That's how life is most of the time, isn't it? You know where you are and where you hope to wind up. It's the getting there that's challenging.
I really like older writers, perhaps because they take me out of my element. I don't have a great deal of interest in reading a fictionalized present as it's pretty insane as it is.
But since the end of the 1970s, at the beginning of the revolution in Iran under Khomenei, we have experienced a politicization of Islam. From the beginning, it had a primary adversary: the emancipation of women. With more men now coming to us from this cultural sphere, and some additionally brutalized by civil wars, this is a problem. We cannot simply ignore it.