Our words had to be circumspect. We could not write anything too negative about our circumstances. This was tricky, since the very form of a married woman's letter needed to include the usual complaints -- that we were pathetic, powerless, worked to ...
I am old enough to know only too well my good and bad qualities, which were often one and the same. For my entire life I longed for love. I knew it was not right for me - as a girl and later as a woman - to want or expect it, but I did, and this unju...
My nun, which is how I think of her, was the most profound witness for God's love I've ever encountered in this world. She was a magnet for lost souls, a petite fortress of strength and unconditional love. What this sprightly, silly, lovely woman did...
Betsy hadn't had sex, actual; sex-sex, full sex, in two hundred and fifty-three days. She decided on her thirty-seventh birthday that she wouldn't sleep with anyone unless it was in the context of a committed relationship which had some sort of futur...
Awareness is a choiceless consciousness. Awareness is the capacity to embrace, accept and include both joy and sadness, love and aloneness, light and darkness, male and female qualities and life and death. Through saying “yes” and accepting both ...
When the filly, the maiden, the boy and the warrior are ready to take up their Destinies, each will know it. The filly will become a mare, the maiden a woman, the boy a man. The Warrior, however, will pick up a stick and walk from his mother, his peo...
You know, Breccan, we were all born into this realm for a purpose. We were born to live in that forest," Gunnar said, pointing ahead. He swallowed deeply as he continued to take in the sight of Surchin. Breccan came up behind Gunnar. "And you know, w...
The bathroom’s down the hall if you want to take off your tights. I can throw ‘em in the dryer for you if you want. Or, you can hang them on the shower curtain rod.” He turned. “It’s been a long time since I’ve had a woman’s tights drap...
Marriage is very important. Marrying a girl is the most important thing a man can do. Never mind business or politics or sport or any of that, there's nothing so vital to the world as a man marrying a woman. That's where we get our children from, tha...
I grieved three thousand times. Then I grieved for myself, a lonely woman without the honor given to the wives of the fallen. The reverence for their loss, for their children's loss. It was eloquent and grand. So moving and charged with solidarity......
Recently, a lot of Americans have swapped the awkward phrase 'same-sex marriage' for the term 'marriage equality'. This phrase is ordinarily implied to mean that same-sex couples will have the rights different-sexed couples do. But it could also mean...
Some women get erased a little at a time, some all at once. Some reappear. Every woman who appears wrestles with the forces that would have her disappear. She struggles with the forces that would tell her story for her, or write her out of the story,...
LEONATO Well, niece, I hope to see you one day fitted with a husband. BEATRICE Not till God make men of some other metal than earth. Would it not grieve a woman to be overmastered with a pierce of valiant dust? to make an account of her life to a clo...
...in response to whatever Alice was struggling with, whatever had caused her to withdraw from him, he had chosen the arms of another woman instead of relying on his own fortitude, as if he'd somehow deserved more comfort than Alice herself had been ...
Many boys, probably most boys, have a first love before they fall in love with a woman. It begins the moment two boys realize they'd die for one another, that each cares more for the other than he does for himself, and it lasts usually until a second...
In living this way, we discover new opportunities for comfort and enjoyment. Where the younger person may have tossed and turned throughout a sleepless night, the older man or woman can possibly feel the pleasure that comes from lying on a good mattr...
Scripture is wrought with a clear message of Jesus’ utter disregard for appearance and social rank. In Judean society, it was a major taboo for a man to even speak to a woman who was not his own wife or daughter; yet Jesus interacted regularly with...
Her life has seen little light. She is twelve years old but has a woman’s weathered poise. Her abyss-blue eyes have a piercing focus that some adults find unsettling. [...] She has fired a gun into a human head. She has watched a pile of bodies set...
That’s how you tell what a man’s really made of. It’s one thing for a man to be big and brave and kill a spider. Any man could do that. Trailin’ after a woman when she’s shopping for thongs and push-up bras is a whole other category of man....
Every life is inexplicable, I kept telling myself. No matter how many facts are told, no matter how many details are given, the essential thing resists telling. To say that so and so was born here and went there, that he did this and did that, that h...
I'd often slip and fall on the ice after last call, which explained the ever-present welts. If I were with a woman, I'd usually execute a precautionary vomit in the men's room in an effort avoid any ugly incidents once I got her back to her place. An...