#native

Religion is for people who're afraid of going to hell. Spirituality is for those who've already been there. ↗

— Vine Deloria Jr.

#religion

So you make this deal with the gods. You do these dances and they'll send rain and good crops and the whole works? And nothing bad will ever happen. Right.' Prayer had always struck me as more or less a glorified attempt at a business transaction. A rain dance even more so. I thought I might finally have offended Loyd past the point of no return, like stealing the lobster from frozen foods that time, to get myself fired. But Loyd was just thinking. After a minute he said, 'No, it's not like that. It's not making a deal, bad things can still happen, but you want to try not to cause them to happen. It has to do with keeping things in balance.' In balance.' Really, it's like the spirits have made a deal with us.' And what is the deal?' I asked. We're on our own. The spirits have been good enough to let us live here and use the utilities, and we're saying: We know how nice you're being. We appreciate the rain, we appreciate the sun, we appreciate the deer we took. Sorry if we messed up anything. You've gone to a lot of trouble, and we'll try to be good guests.' Like a note you'd send somebody after you stayed in their house?' Exactly like that. 'Thanks for letting me sleep on your couch. I took some beer out of the refrigerator, and I broke a coffee cup. Sorry, I hope it wasn't your favorite one. ↗

— Barbara Kingsolver

#prayer #religion #business

In prehistoric times, mankind often had only two choices in crisis situations: fight or flee. In modern times, humor offers us a third alternative; fight, flee - or laugh. ↗

— Robert Orben

#choices #crisis #fight #flee #had

It is not that the child lives in a world of imagination, but that the child within us survives and starts into life only at rare moments of recollection, which makes us believe, and it is not true, that, as children, we were imaginative? ↗

— Cesare Pavese

#child #children #imagination #imaginative #into

Lord, Bless our enemies; have mercy upon them, may they turn their course and let us alone, and let us live in peace at our homes in our own native land. ↗

— William Pennington

#bless #course #homes #land #let us

But one day, when I was still young, I was parted from my family and left my native country. I hunted and searched for music, and destiny turned me into the object of my hunt. The circumstances of life became my 'antlers' and prevented me from returning home. ↗

— Georg Solti

#circumstances #country #day #destiny #family

I don't know how to do anything else other than be an actor. If I wasn't in this, I would be in alternative energy and conservation. ↗

— Ian Somerhalder

#alternative #anything #conservation #else #energy

Acting is a great way to make a living, especially when I consider what my alternatives were and probably still are. I mean, you are only making movies. It is a lot less pressure than being a surgeon; although it seemed like the only other thing that I was qualified for was manual labour. ↗

— James Spader

#alternatives #although #being #consider #especially

I have quite a robust relationship with regret. You simply don't know what the alternative would have been. ↗

— Juliet Stevenson

#been #i #know #quite #regret

The U.S. is blessed with tremendously creative and imaginative law students at places like Chicago, Harvard, Columbia and Yale. ↗

— Cass Sunstein

#chicago #columbia #creative #harvard #imaginative