I haven't been silent. I teach, I lecture at universities, I write, I'm not silent.
Some think of Islam as an expedient jobs program that moves the female half of the population out of the way.
I ask people who don't fly, "How can you not fly when you live in a time in history when you can fly?"
So much of who we are is where we have been.
Mechanical wings allow us to fly, but it is with our minds that we make the sky ours
I sometimes still go out hunting for bad weather, flying low in simple airplanes to explore the inner reaches of the clouds. Less experienced pilots occasionally join me, not to learn formal lessons about weather flying, but with a more advanced purpose in mind - to accompany me in the slow accumulation of experience through circumstances that never repeat in a place that defies mastery.
You should not see the desert simply as some faraway place of little rain. There are many forms of thirst.
The Pashtuns in particular are kind of trapped. They've never accepted the Durand Line nor has any Afghan government historically accepted it.
We can't understand the universe in any clear way without the supernatural.
Once I returned to the Church and began to see the universe as a place that really did incorporate redemption and really tried to understand the implications of there being a God, my identification with the vampires as outcasts, as outsiders and lost souls began to totally wane. It no longer worked for me. I had done it. It had led me to this point.
I was a strange kid. I'm still strange. People didn't get me. And I didn't expect them to.