There are some things, after all, that Sally Owens knows for certain: Always throw spilled salt over your left shoulder. Keep rosemary by your garden gate. Add pepper to your mashed potatoes. Plant roses and lavender, for luck. Fall in love whenever ...
As you pray for your children, you will find it to be an unending habit of your heart. Being able to positively affect your children in prayer will keep you in close contact with them and actively involved in their lives, even after they leave home. ...
A colleague once described political theorists as people who were obsessed with two dozen books; after half a century of grappling with Mill's essay On Liberty, or Hobbes's Leviathan, I have sometimes thought two dozen might be a little on the high s...
He put his ear to his own chest and listened to the heart. How could the pulse go on, beat after beat, for all of life? No machine could run that long without a stumble. Ask not if the beating cranks are going to jam, but when.
People aren’t interested in the truth, Dafar. They’re interested in what keeps them safe. They’re interested in being looked after. They’re interested in a tale being spun... Mighty men have moments of great despair that common people do not ...
There was something shameful about surviving sorrow. You were corrupted. She was corrupted. She was no good anymore. She was inauthentic, apocryphal. She wanted to be a seeker and to travel further and further. But after sorrow, such traveling is not...
Those of us who are most genuinely repelled by war and violence are also those who are most likely to decide that some things, after all, are worth fighting for.
It's dangerous because my thoughts get away from themselves. Mixed with emotion, they pile up like the garbage that surrounds me. They stack layer upon layer, deeper and deeper, month after month- crushing, festering, smoldering. One day something is...
Women, they were tricky business. A man had to step carefully lest he find himself in a pit of despair, longing after the one he wants and getting nothing but scorn in return. What was it about her that drove him crazy? He'd never had such a wild and...
One day, after practice, he came up behind me, tapped me on the shoulder, and as I turned around, he sucker-punched me and relocated my nose to the other side of my face. What up, Mr. Drum Captain? How's your drumming going, bro? Played any arenas la...
Gradually, after being the target a few times of a similar capriciousness, which he discerned as default behavior for most people, and not liking it, Paul learned to not be more generous or enthusiastic or attentive that he could sustain regardless o...
By developing a contaminated, stigmatized identity, the child victim takes the evil of the abuser into herself and thereby preserves her primary attachments to her parents. Because the inner sense of badness preserves a relationship, it is not readil...
They were small, brightly coloured, happy little creatures who secreted some of the nastiest toxins in the world, which is why the job of looking after the large vivarium where they happily passed their days was given to first-year students, on the b...
Here.” He spread his legs wider and patted the floor between them. “You’ll be warmer, and I promise I won’t grope you or anything.” Yes, because getting groped by a handsome, charming man hours after getting dumped by a workaholic iceberg w...
If love had its limits, and those limits tasted like lasagna, could you see yourself dating a can of chicken noodle soup? I only ask because I’m in the mood to spoon. After all, I am the 2014 World Cuddling Champion.
Unless I’m dead, I’ll definitely be at your funeral. Just be sure to return the favor and show up at mine. Your death will be the death of me, and that is why you should attend my funeral. After all, if you don’t show up, I might have trouble s...
They call alcohol spirits, because it’s the spirit turned liquid. Would you drink my soul if you knew I’d use it to get inside of you? After all, most men buy women alcohol so they can get inside them too.
I wish I had eyes that changed colors from blue to gray, and then after I cried, to all the colors of the rainbow, because then I’d just sit in front of the mirror writing poems that alternated between extremely sad poems, to poems about light refr...
Babette looked too good for the place tonight, but then goodness is only relative after all ("Steps Going Up" aka "Guillotine" aka "Men Must Die")
I could be the best lover you’ll ever have. Maybe not the best in bed, but I could be the best conversationalist. It’s called “pillow talk” for a reason, because most men fall asleep right after sex, leaving the pillow as the only thing a wom...
I think a cool war helmet is painted with red and white concentric circles, exactly like a bull’s eye. But I’m not a fighter—I’m a lover. That’s why I’m joining the military. I figure after well over a decade of continuous war, all they d...
