For a few moments, attune your mind to the idea of harmony and peaceful coexistence flowing among all peoples and nations. The source of this idea is deep within your heart. As you calmly breathe in and out, picture it radiating from you like a fine,...
He grabbed me with both hands and began pushing me backward. I lost my balance. The ledge was at an angle, and it was covered with loose gravel. I was less than a foot from the edge. It was at that very moment that the clouds parted. The September su...
When it comes to death, we know that laughter and tears are pretty much the same thing. And so, laughing and crying, we said good-bye to my grandmother. And when we said goodbye to one grandmother, we said good-bye to all of them. Each funeral was a ...
School did give me one of the greatest gifts of my life, though. I learned how to read, and for that I remain thankful. I would have died otherwise. As soon as I was able, I read, alone. Under the covers with a flashlight or in my corner of the attic...
My needs were covered by layer upon layer of denial. I was scrambling for reasons. But the truth was, even if he had had a successful career, I would have used it as an excuse to complain about neglect. He could never actually win. I was running a ve...
Although of course I am aware that it changes colour in a jar. But we know why, surely? The heavier melancholic elements in the blood sink, making the top lighter and the bottom darker." "Not so," I said firmly. "Cover the jar, and the colour does no...
Bones are patient. Bones never tire nor do they run away. When you come upon a man who has been dead many years, his bones will still be lying there, in place, content, patiently waiting, but his flesh will have gotten up and left him. Water is like ...
Like all of my important memories, it has a potency that has influenced the pocket of time that holds it, so I can remember that particular Saturday afternoon, even though in many ways it was no different from any other. I can remember, for example, ...
She seemed dressed in all of me, stretched across my shame. All the torment and the pain leaked through and covered me. I'd do anything to have her to myself. Just to have her for myself Now I don't know what to do, I don't know what to do when she m...
Beauty is frightening," they will tell you — Lazily you will arrange A Spanish shawl on your shoulders, A red rose in your hair. "Beauty is simple," they will tell you — Clumsily with a motley shawl You will cover a child up, A red rose on the fl...
Rosy lifted her arm, tried to say something, then pointed at the cafe, held her head, covered her mouth and—humiliation of humiliations—she began to cry. Right there in the street. “I’m so confused,” she said but it came out as a great honk...
It was one of those moments in which I become very uncomfortable. One of those times when nothing you say can be right, and almost anything you do say is wrong. I could see no answer but the classic Croaker approach. I began to back away. That is how...
Samsa looked down in dismay at his naked body. How ill-formed it was! Worse than ill-formed. It possessed no means of self-defense. Smooth white skin (covered by only a perfunctory amount of hair) with fragile blue blood vessels visible through it; a...
It had a crisp paper jacket, unlike the paper-covered library books I was used to, and the way the pages parted, I could tell I was the first to open it ... I valued that half-dream state of being lost in a book so much that I limited the number of p...
I assert most unhesitatingly, that the religion of the south is a mere covering for the most horrid crimes, - a justifier of the most appalling barbarity, - a sanctifier of the most hateful frauds, - and a dark shelter under, which the darkest, foule...
At Gabriel College there was a very holy object on the high altar of the Oratory, covered with a black velvet cloth... At the height of the invocation the Intercessor lifted the cloth to reveal in the dimness a glass dome inside which there was somet...
And as He spoke, He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived h...
...The man who stood before her was taller and stranger than anyone she had ever encountered. His unkempt hair was a long dark brown, partially braided and twisted around twigs, the tips of his pointed ears poking between strands. His bare chest made...
He approaches a cockroach in only one respect: his coloration is brown. That is all. Apart from this he has a tremendous convex belly divided into segments and a hard rounded back suggestive of wing cases. In beetles these cases conceal flimsy little...
I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that literary characters acquire in the reader's mind. No matter how many times we reopen 'King Lear,' never shall we find the good king banging his tankard in ...
Shut up!" I say, holding my hands to my ears. "Shut up!" But the stupid gummy won't shut up; he's trying to tell me something important even though I'm covering my ears and I don't want to hear it and I don't want to think about who I am or what's wr...
