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Selected Stories

There was a turtle named Arnold who went to college. He studied carrying heavy loads and going without water. He graduated with honors as a camel.

Visiting North Carolina, June 1984

A Different World

The Sexual Politics of Ursula Le Guin

There is much to admire in these novels beyond the brilliance of their central conceptions. Their style is vivid but simple, utterly unpretentious, with the kind of transparency that reveals ideas in all their clarity. I can’t remember when I have done reading that is so satisfactory on an emotional level — telling a story I want to hear — and also on an intellectual level, provoking hours of thought beyond what the books even dealt with.

True Love

A Conversation With Bartholomew

Bartholomew: I see two areas of difficulty. One is in the realm of relationships. Can you tell me your perception of the problem?

Louis David: I’m thinking of my wife, Christine. We’ve been married 17 years. Not long ago, she and I met with her therapist and he said that I recreated her reality for her.

Adding On

Selected Stories

A Zen monk and a Catholic priest were walking along a road. They came to a baby crying by the side of the road. The monk did nothing. The priest picked up the baby and held it in his arms. The baby stopped crying, and soon the mother came and took it from the priest.

Sunbeams

Newspapers are unable, seemingly, to discriminate between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilization.

George Bernard Shaw

People, Land, And Community

During the last eighteen years, for example, I have been working at the restoration of a once exhausted hillside. Its scars are now healed over, though still visible, and this year it has provided abundant pasture, more than in any year since we have owned it. But to make it as good as it is now has taken eighteen years. If I had been a millionaire or if my family had been starving, it would still have taken eighteen years.

Summer

There’s the pain denied so many times, in so many ways, that I know its disguises in others, can tell an honest man from a block away: he sways on his vulnerability, no flower but fully human, bends to his breeze, weeps in his rain.

Sunbeams

A human being is a part of the whole called by us “universe,” a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

Albert Einstein