Quotes by "Gwen Chavarria"

Shannon thought about all the childhood diseases that had been eradicated, but what good did it do? A child's life could still be wiped away in an instant. Why did modern people presume that they would die only in old age? Previous generations hadn't made such a presumption. She also thought about the opportunities of motherhood that were now lost to her. She wished she had said and done more to confirm Marzieh's positive sense of self. She wondered if Marzieh understood how much her mother loved her. On the fifth day things began to improve. Hope was a tiny red fish wiggling through a wide, black, slow-moving river under a dark sky. Shannon leaned over the bow of an old, splintered rowboat adrift in the water in order to greet it.
Tags: parenthood, motherhood, love, hope, death
As he learned more math, Brodt made the wonder-inspiring observation that mathematical laws seemed to be Someone's intention rather than just accidents in many concepts: infinity, unity being totality, irrational numbers in general and pi in particular as it illustrates such disparate occurrences as the relationship of height to base perimeter in the Great Pyramid of Giza and the course of any meandering river (over a surface smoothed for consistency). There was also the Fibonacci Sequence, that looping string of addends which, with their sums, describes the spirals on a nautilus shell, the distribution of leaves around a tree branch, and the genealogy of ants and bees. It all seemed too orderly, too regular and consistent to have occurred by chance. So many things in the world appeared as blotches, smears, or random spikes that these mathematically explained phenomena were extraordinary--he wanted to say mystical, but he wouldn't want to be caught using that word.
Tags: spirituality, science, mysticism, mathematics, knowledge, god
She was always on guard against false claims that religious faith was psychologically unhealthy. She was religious, her family and friends were religious, and they were okay. They were more than okay. They were confident, compassionate, productive people--all this while realizing that when they wanted to walk across a room, they didn't place one foot in front of the other unless God animated them to do so.
Tags: spirituality, religion, god, faith