Although you should respect venomous snakes and approach them with caution, most snakes you encounter in an urban environment are harmless and beneficial because they eat insects, mice and other rodents.
Losing prepares you for the heartbreak, setback, and the tragedy that you will encounter in the world more than winning ever can. By licking your wounds you learn how to avoid getting wounded the next time.
We continually encounter hardships. People disappoint us. We disappoint ourselves. But God is constant and compassionate. We are not alone. He cares. Against all reason, the transcendent God loves us so much that He has committed Himself to us.
Meg was going to have to learn for herself what Laurie had figured out over the summer - that it was better to leave well enough alone, to avoid unnecessary encounters with the people you'd left behind, to not keep poking at that sore tooth with the tip of your tongue. Not because you didn't love them anymore, but because you did, and because that love was useless now, just another dull ache in your phantom limb.
To live every day as if it had been stolen from death, that is how I would like to live. To feel the joy of life, as Eve felt the joy of life. To separate oneself from the burden, the angst, the anguish that we all encounter every day. To say I am alive, I am wonderful, I am. I am. That is something to aspire to.
You're after something - not a story, but a certain, exquisitely intense encounter with beauty - and the only way to find it is to tiptoe past the dragon's cave.
All things in the world are singing a song, reciting a poem, inaudibly, to their surroundings, to the things they encounter.
There's no way that I know of to avoid pain absolutely, but suffering is the interpretation we choose to place on the pain we encounter.
Once shame touches your being at any point, even the most distant nerve is implicated, whether you know it or not; any fleeting encounter or random thought will rake up the anguish and add to it.
The road itself is informative, because it forces you to respond spontaneously and to encounter the unexpected. It forces you to reassess what you felt about people or issues or places, and it forces you to live in the present.
In an age of synthetic images and synthetic emotions, the chances of an accidental encounter with reality are remote indeed.
When you encounter another person, when you have dealings with anyone at all, it is as if a question is being put to you. So you must think, What is the Lord asking of me in this moment, in this situation?
You must always remember, because the mediocre mind you encounter may be your own.
During youth a blossoming and budding forth tries to happen from inside out as each young person encounters what is seeded in them and gifted in their soul.
When we trust our creativity we encounter a supreme kind of enjoyment - an amazement at the natural unfolding of life beyond our ordinary way of looking at things.
I'm in favor of sexual encounters.
When you meet anyone, treat the even as a holy encounter.
Russia and the U. S. have announced they are definitely planning several space machines. So it's quite possible that the first space ships or satellites may encounter other interplanetary machines, manned or otherwise. Our space devices may even be closely approached by such alien machines.
True encounter with Christ liberates something within us, a power we did not know we had, a capacity to grow and change.
Philip Galanes has fashioned a novel both bleak and funny about a young man's struggle to sort out his troubled love: the too-strong love for his mother, the too-weak love for his suicidal father, and the all-consuming love of anonymous sexual encounters. Pointed and acute, this story tells of the narrator's many betrayals of others and their many betrayals of him. It exists in an uncomfortable moral space where the humor of terrible things sometimes outweighs, but never obscures, their poignancy.