Adopted. Big Deal; so was Superman

Even if I could have told you, it would have been a lecture. Why do you think kids don’t listen to their parents, or people don’t leave churches and do what the preacher tells them?...

Something about the joy and pain of that moment, something about the excruciating contrast, made me feel that no matter what happens now, my life has been worth it. What a ride.

There is no Jesus without Judas, no Martin Luther King, Jr., without the Klan; no Ali without Joe Frazier; no freedom without tyranny. No wisdom exists that does not include perspective. Relativity is the greatest...

…You don’t always get what you expect. I wish someone, sometime when I was growing up, would have told me what expectations would get me. … Our parents, schools, everyone tells us things will be...

As a child abuse and neglect therapist I do battle daily with Christians enamored of the Old Testament phrase “Spare the rod and spoil the child.” No matter how far I stretch my imagination, it...

Since then I have searched for my heroes among small-t truths. I always find them among people learning the art of acceptance: not acceptance of defeat or acceptance of some inability to influence their own...

From a distance,’ he says, ‘my car looks just like every other car on the freeway, and Sarah Byrnes looks just like the rest of us. And if she’s going to get help, she’ll get...

144461I know very little having to do with human beings that doesn’t also have to do with connection. We want to be noticed, we want to be good enough, we want friends, and we want...

…we can say we love each other if my life is better because you’re in it and your life is better because I’m in it.

You have to see everyone in relationship to you. Just because you understand the shit in someone else’s life doesn’t mean you don’t stand up for your own

Talking with Elaine like that, with no judgment from her or anything, seemed to bring my feelings more to the surface so I could look at them. I love times like that; you don’t get...

You have to be mad in the language you’re mad in.

Does anyone in this room have it?””No, Chris, no one here has it.””How do you know?””Because the mark was dark skin. Negroes are the descendants of Cain.”I didn’t have my civil-rights sensibilities yet, but I...

A sport has its own built-in integrity, doesn’t need an artificial one. Athletics carries its own set of truths, and those truths are diminished and manipulated by people with agendas.

Viruses have no morality, no sense of good and evil, the deserving or the undeserving…. AIDS is not the swift sword with which the Lord punishes the evil practitioners of male homosexuality and intravenous drug...

…racist thought and action says far more about the person they come from than the person they are directed at.

He tries to force the anger down, but it’s like an anvil on his chest. He closes his eyes, like Sammy taught him, and forces the anvil up; he softens.

We get crazy when we can’t make things be like the world tells us they are”. She looked back out the window. “It was that way for me and your brother, I think. I mean,...

But the truth doesn’t need to be known, or believed, to be true.

Comedy is tragedy standing on its head with its pants down.

Nothing exists without its opposite.