It's a party house." "I hope for your sake it's a very tame party." If he brought me to some sort of sex orgy, he would fly right through one of those pretty windows, headfirst.
You can’t blame me,” Ascanio said. “Anybody in my place would be concerned. You don’t even have a proper horse. You’re riding a mutant equine of unknown origin.” “Don’t disrespect my donkey
Now remember, Kate." Barabas leaned over to me, grinning. "You are the Consort. Be the Consort." He stretched "be" into a three-syllable word. "Think like a-" "Open the door or I'll punch you right in the face," I growled.
There's release in knowing the truth no matter how anguishing it is. You come finally to the irreducible thing, and there's nothing left to do but pick it up and hold it. Then, at last, you can enter the severe mercy of acceptance.
The writer’s life requires courage, patience, empathy, openness. It requires the ability to be alone with oneself. Gentle with oneself. To be disciplined, and at the same time, take risks.
Have you noticed," she asked him, "how we live much of our lives in the past and most of the rest of it in the future? Have you noticed how often the present moment slips by quiet unnoticed?
There is nothing worse, is there," she said, "than a past that has never been fully dealt with. One can convince oneself, that it is all safely in the past and forgotten about, but the very fact that we can tell ourselves that it is forgotten proves ...
Then she squeezed me tighter. Her leg came up and wrapped around me. Then she kissed me too hard and our teeth banged together. I felt like a boa constrictor’s dinner.
Always live your life with your biography in mind," Dad was fond of saying. "Naturally, it won't be published unless you have a Magnificent Reason, but at the very least you will be living grandly.
One of my pet peeves was when an adult imagined they had to encapsulate Life for you, hand you Life in a jar, in an eyedropper, in a penguin paperweight full of snow-A Collector's Dream.
For every hour a mother gets to herself, a father will demand five times that amount for drinking with friends and acting like an immature dipshit.
She looked at me for a second and said, "Oh, never mind. I guess it's true what Mom said? That you've led a sheltered life?" I said I thought the description fairly apt.
We tend to forget at times that it is the little ones, the children, who do suffer the greatest hurt. If we cannot comprehend why certain sorrows are visited upon us, how on earth can they?
What followed was for him a very entertaining spectacle, with one of Edward's brothers seemingly intent upon the most subtle of seductions and the other barely able to force malmsey past the gorge rising in his throat.
She opened her mouth, clamped it shut again. This was new, this sudden favor shown Gloucester, had been brought back with him from Burgundy like some malevolent foreign pox.
But it is only people who have plenty of money who can despise it. To the rest of us it is important. It can at least put food in our stomachs clothes on our backs, and it can at least feed our dreams.
The Peruvian flute music is . . . cool. In this music, they have not yet invented the industrial revolution that leads to excessive punctuality or the failed experiment they call the nuclear family. This is the music of elements, untarnished, unrehea...
I believe in walking out of a museum before the paintings you've seen begin to run together. How else can you carry anything away with you in your mind's eye?
If shadows were caused by the interplay between light and Life, a child's was still forming. An adult's was inextricably bound to his body, but a child had a tenuous relationship to his own permanence, and thus, his own shadow.
I tried to think the same thought in as many different religions as possible, so the thought itself wouldn't be limited by any particular way of reasoning, the way words restrict -- the whole eskimo-seventeen-words-for-snow idea.
It was a limitation of human consciousness: We live only in the future and past, we cannot perceive occupies no space, a hypothetical gap between future and past. Only an exceptional few could feel athletes and jazzmen and, yes, thieves...
