I realized it for the first time in my life: there is nothing but mystery in the world, how it hides behind the fabric of our poor, browbeat days, shining brightly, and we don't even know it.
I would not have survived that dark time if it weren't for Cloudtail. He gave me another destiny, and I knew that no matter what I looked like, I would be all right. As long as Cloudtail loved me, I was no longer Lostface, but Brightheart.
We've been working out of our tin can for half a decade. Nobody suggests moving into a brick-and-mortar office; nobody wants to peer through glass windows, in a building with a foundation, and admit that the insomnia emergency is now a permanent cond...
An important aspect of the ebbing of sex was that other things became interesting. Sex obliterates the individuality of young women more often than it does that of young men, because so much more of a woman than a man is used by sex.
If you write literary fiction that’s set partly in the future, you’re apparently a sci-fi writer ... I think of it as being more of a story about what remains after we lose everything and the importance of art in our lives.
The world’s bumper sticker reads: Life sucks, and then you die. Perhaps Christian bumper stickers should read: Life sucks, but then you find hope and you can’t wait to die.
B looked down the shaft, at a metal ladder and darkness beyond. "Me first?" Of course. You're the apprentice, so you always go first into the unknown. If anyone's going to be eaten by a grue, it should be you." Tough job. But at least the hours are t...
... even though it was beautiful and comfortable, and even though it was the world, it was also a little bit boring. No, wait. Maybe boring isn’t the right word. What’s the word I’m wanting here? Lonely. That’s it. It was a little bit lonely.
I believe that it may be normal, healthy, and even productive to experience mild to moderate depression from time to time as part of the variable emotional spectrum, either as an appropriate response to situations or as a way of turning inward and me...
Dear Hope, I NEVER thought Id see the day when two of your daily e-mails sandwiched a message from none other than PAUL PARLIPIANO. My crush to end all crushes! Gay man of my dreams! OOOH!
He was your usual man when it came to romance, which is to say he couldn’t recite Baa Baa Black Sheep when sober, whereas when drunk, sixteen cantos of Byron’s Don Juan was par for the course.
It'll turn out you mean love,' Sholto said. 'At the moment math is the only thing that excites you so you're nosing around numbers as if numbers are life. But in two years you'll be telling me about some boy.
I'm tired of being set upon by crazed Christians one minute and unbridled libertines the next. Girls, I'm going camping.
Em didn't truly understand about my panic attacks - no one did. But she'd never pushed me to explain, never tried to ditch me when things got weird, and never once looked at me like I was a freak.
If {Death} comes for you?” he said. “Would you be so sanguine then?” She laughed and the pensiveness was gone. “No indeed. I will curse the stars and go down fighting. But it will still have been a wonderful thing, to cross the mist.
Hard to believe that so nearby, just across the Channel, such atrocities could still occur in their supposedly civilized world, that one could wake up one morning and find oneself bereft of brothers, parents, friends, all with the slice of an ax.
I suddenly realise that it doesn't matter how far I go, or how lost I am, or how lonely I feel. I fit in here. I always will. That's how I know I'm home.
Word of advice, sister mine. If you want to keep your papers private, don't write 'Private' on the cover. It set the mater right off. It was all I could do to stop her sniffing around like some great sniffing thing.
A person without her or his own truth ain't a person at all, Ida said. Anybody who tells you different—is a jackass, and no longer deserves to be called human being.
The misery of other people is only an abstraction [...] something that can be sympathized with only by drawing from one's own experiences. But as it stands, true empathy remains impossible. And so long as it is, people will continue to suffer the pre...
...we are all sorry when loss comes for us. The test of our character comes not in how many tears we shed but in how we act after those tears have dried.
