You remember the old Roadrunner cartoons, where the coyote would run off a cliff and keep going, until he looked down and happened to notice that he was running on nothing more than air?"

"Yeah."

"Well," he said, "I always used to wonder what would have happened if he'd never looked down. Would the air have stayed solid under his feet until he reached the other side? I think we're all like that. We start heading out across this canyon, looking straight ahead at the thing that matters, but something, some fear or insecurity, makes us look down. And we see we're walking on air, and we panic, and turn around and scramble like hell to get back to solid ground. And if we just wouldn't look down, we could make it to the other side. The place where things matter.


Jonathan Tropper

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JONATHAN STROUD
Well, when you're being held at gunpoint by a geriatric madman in a metal skirt, you've kind of hit ...
JONATHAN STROUD
God rest her soul and may she never walk at night
JONATHAN STROUD
A dozen more questions occurred to me. Not to mention twenty-two possible solutions to each one, six...
JONATHAN STROUD
One magician demanded I show him an image of the love of his life. I rustled up a mirror.
JONATHAN STROUD
According to some, heroic deaths are admirable things. I've never been convinced by this argument, m...
JONATHAN STROUD
Zealots: Wild eyed persons afflicted with incurable certainty about the workings of the world, a cer...
JONATHAN STROUD
Then again, Solomon was human. And that meant he was flawed (Go on, take a look at yourself in the m...
JONATHAN STROUD
Besides, if you're going to die horribly, you might as well do it with style.
JONATHAN STROUD
More ghosts have been created in bedrooms than anywhere else.
JONATHAN STROUD
Strange how close the darkness is, even when things seem brightest. Even in the glare of a summer no...
JONATHAN STROUD
Men are happy to be laughed at for their humor, but not for their folly.
JONATHAN SWIFT
Don't set your wit against a child.
JONATHAN SWIFT
Positiveness is a good quality for preachers and speakers because, whoever shares his thoughts with ...
JONATHAN SWIFT
It is the folly of too many to mistake the echo of a London coffee-house for the voice of the kingdo...
JONATHAN SWIFT
Necessity is the mother of invention, it is true -- but it's father is creativity, and knowledge is ...
JONATHAN SCHATTKE
Poor nations are hungry, and rich nations are proud; and pride and hunger will ever be at variance.
JONATHAN SWIFT
If there are amazing graces on this earth, I believe that they are these good children sent to us by...
JONATHAN KOZOL
The stoical scheme of supplying our wants by lopping off our desires, is like cutting off our feet w...
JONATHAN SWIFT
Complaint is the largest tribute Heaven receives.
JONATHAN SWIFT
Rebukes are easy from our betters,
From men of quality and letters;
But when low dunces will ...
JONATHAN SWIFT
What some people invent the rest enlarge.
JONATHAN SWIFT
All human race would be wits. And millions miss, for one that hits.
JONATHAN SWIFT
Nothing is so great an example of bad manners as flattery. If you flatter all the company, you pleas...
JONATHAN SWIFT
In church your grandsire cut his throat; to do the job too long he tarried: he should have had my he...
JONATHAN SWIFT
Better belly burst than good liquor be lost.
JONATHAN SWIFT
We are so fond on one another because our ailments are the same.
JONATHAN SWIFT
Argument, as usually managed, is the worst sort of conversation, as in books it is generally the wor...
JONATHAN SWIFT
Censure is the tax a man pays to the public for being eminent.
JONATHAN SWIFT
What makes literature interesting is that it does not survive its translation. The characters in a n...
JONATHAN MILLER
Coffee makes us severe, and grave, and philosophical.
JONATHAN SWIFT
Living in cities is an art, and we need the vocabulary of art, of style, to describe the peculiar re...
JONATHAN RABAN
One of the very best rules of conversation is to never, say anything which any of the company wish h...
JONATHAN SWIFT
And he gave it for his opinion, that whoever could make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass, to...
JONATHAN SWIFT
Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win.
JONATHAN KOZOL
Ambition often puts Men upon doing the meanest offices; so climbing is performed in the same positio...
JONATHAN SWIFT
The best doctors in the world are Doctor Diet, Doctor Quiet, and Doctor Merryman.
JONATHAN SWIFT
I wasn't driven into medicine by a social conscience but by rampant curiosity.
JONATHAN MILLER
For the rest,
Whatever we have got has been by infinite labor, and search, and ranging through e...
JONATHAN SWIFT
We have a choice: to plow new ground or let the weeds grow.
JONATHAN WESTOVER
I went to Washington to challenge the soft bigotry of low expectations,
JONATHAN KOZOL
What they do in heaven we are ignorant of; what they do not do we are told expressly.
JONATHAN SWIFT
I never knew a man come to greatness or eminence who lay abed late in the morning.
JONATHAN SWIFT
One enemy can do more hurt than ten friends can do good.
JONATHAN SWIFT
When a true genius appears in this world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in ...
JONATHAN SWIFT
'Tis an old maxim in the schools,
That flattery's the food of fools;
Yet now and then your men...
JONATHAN SWIFT
She wears her clothes as if they were thrown on with a pitch folk.
JONATHAN SWIFT
One of the oddest features of western Christianized culture is its ready acceptance of the myth of t...
JONATHAN RABAN
I will venture to affirm, that the three seasons wherein our corn has miscarried did no more contrib...
JONATHAN SWIFT
It is a maxim among these lawyers, that whatever hath been done before, may legally be done again: a...
JONATHAN SWIFT
Come, agree, the law's costly.
JONATHAN SWIFT
There's none so blind as they that won't see.
JONATHAN SWIFT
Satire is a sort of glass wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own; wh...
JONATHAN SWIFT
Brutes find out where their talents lie;
A bear will not attempt to fly,
A foundered horse w...
JONATHAN SWIFT
Over emphatic negatives always suggest that what is being denied may be what is really being asserte...
JONATHAN RABAN
But when a Man
JONATHAN SWIFT
Pretense is the overrating of any kind of knowledge we pretend to.
JONATHAN SWIFT
There are two sorts of hypocrites; ones that are deceived with their outward morality and external r...
JONATHAN EDWARDS
Attitudes to museums have changed. If it had Marilyn Monroe's knickers or Laurence Olivier's jockstr...
JONATHAN MILLER
Grace is but glory begun, and glory is but grace perfected.
JONATHAN EDWARDS
I said there was a society of men among us, bred up from their youth in the art of proving by words ...
JONATHAN SWIFT
Invention is the talent of youth, as judgment is of age.
JONATHAN SWIFT
Interest is the spur of the people, but glory that of great souls. Invention is the talent of youth,...
JONATHAN SWIFT
I wont quarrel with my bread and butter.
JONATHAN SWIFT
I wonder what fool it was that first invented kissing.
JONATHAN SWIFT
It was a bold person that first ate an oyster.
JONATHAN SWIFT
A bad forgery's the ultimate insult.
JONATHAN GASH
Promises and pie crusts are made to be broken.
JONATHAN SWIFT