The Bodega at the End of the Internet

If you have given up your heart for the Tower, Roland, you have already lost. A heartless creature is a loveless creature, and a loveless creature is a beast.

“Your input determines your outlook. Your outlook determines your output, and your output determines your future.” — Zig Ziglar

He felt oddly empty now that he no longer had the key to work on—purposeless and directionless.

Later the two of them had strolled through the azalea-shaded cloister of the parish patio. They sat beneath an arbor where grapes were ripening.

"They're bitter, Father," the priest anticipated Father Renteria's question. "We live in a land in which everything grows, thanks to God's providence; but everything that grows is bitter. That is our

The pleasures connected with his work were pleasures of ambition; his social pleasures were those of vanity; but Ivan Ilych’s greatest pleasure was playing bridge.

We mistakenly assume that the present is merely a continuation of the past, a predictable outcome of previous actions.

But what if we’re looking in the wrong direction? What if the true nature of reality lies not in the quantized past, but in the ever-present, unquantifiable now?

Pessimism drifts in the air like a virulent pathogen, infecting multitudes.

“Here’s what I mean by building your own little subculture,” Morrie said. “I don’t mean you disregard every rule of your community. I don’t go around naked, for example. I don’t run through red lights. The little things, I can obey. But the big things—how we think, what we value—those you must choose yourself. You can’t let anyone—or any