Some Christians pretend that Christianity was not established by the sword; but of what period of time do they speak? It was impossible that twelve men could begin with the sword: they had not the power; but no sooner were the professors of Christian...
What do you mean, 'Angle of Repose?' she asked me when I dreamed we were talking about Grandmother's life, and I said it was the angle at which a man or woman finally lies down. I suppose it is; and yet ... I thought when I began, and still think, th...
To me, summer has always been about potential. This was especially true when I was in high school. Those 3 or so months between 1 school year and the next always meant change. People got taller or wider or smaller. They broke up or came together, los...
Whatever wisdom I have has been hard-earned – each meaning carefully culled out of the dictionary of human experiences and emotions and put in its precise place in the matrix. Meaning doesn’t come easy. The Great Crossword Setter in the Sky is ca...
Emma convinced herself she'd lost him because she was fast. She was also adept at convincing herself of things that might not be - good at pretending. She could pretend she took classes at night by choice, and that blushing didn't make her thirsty-- ...
Ginny, listen...I can't be involved with you anymore. We've got to stop seeing each other. We can't be together." "It's for some stupid noble reason isn't it?" "It's been like...like something out of someone else's life these last few weeks with you....
Once we were blobs in the sea, and then fishes, and then lizards and rats and then monkeys, and hundreds of things in between. This hand was once a fin, this hand once had claws! In my human mouth I have the pointy teeth of a wolf and the chisel teet...
In the Carolinas they say "hill people" are different from "flatlands people," and as a native Kentuckian with more mountain than flatlands blood, I'm inclined to agree. This was one of the theories I'd been nursing all the way from San Francisco. Un...
You may find that you have been telling yourself that practicing optimism is a risk, as though, somehow, a positive attitude will invite disaster and so if you practice optimism it may increase your feelings of vulnerability. The trick is to increase...
But at times words can be a dangerous addition to music — they can pin it down. Words imply that the music is about what the words say, literally, and nothing more. If done poorly, they can destroy the pleasant ambiguity that constitutes much of th...
The master always keeps a piece of learning--that is to say, a piece of the student's ignorance--up his sleeve. I understood that, says the satisfied student. You think so, corrects the master. in fact, there's a difficulty here that I've been sparin...
You told us this place was haunted. How haunted is it?" Paul cast a quick glance at the house. "I'm not sure. When they found the bodies twenty years ago, the place became off-limits. That was horror enough. There were whispers of strange stuff going...
Finally, he smiled, and although his smile was bumpy because some of his teeth were jagged and broken, it was a warming, infectious smile that was reflected in his eyes. It made her smile widely in return. She felt as if the room had been lit up. He ...
I can fairly say it was the first time in my new life that I really wished I wasn't supernatural: if I had been human the pain would have stopped because I would be dead. II can only describe it as what a person would feel if he somehow, by some terr...
I came to feel a tenderness for them all. This was something new to me. It gave me a curious pleasure to touch them, to help them in and out of the chair, to shave their weather-toughened old faces. They had known hard use, nearly all of them. You co...
Emotional baggage,” which is carried over from the past, colors our perceptions. Likewise, past conclusions and beliefs, based on reasoning that may or may not have been accurate, also tint our perception of reality. Retaining our capacity for reas...
Number 23 had plenty of redeeming qualities that made falling for him a justifiable accident. But our connection had nothing to do with our similarities, our differences, our aesthetic attractions, or our emotional and physical needs. When we spoke, ...
Each day, at the same time, Jude would return and they would be there, led by Webb, whose life could not have been more different than his. Where Webb's memories of childhood were idyllic and earthy, Jude's reeked of indifference. Webb read fantasy; ...
As she bends for a Kleenex in the dark, I am thinking of other girls: the girl I loved who fell in love with a lion--she lost her head over it--we just necked a lot; of the girl who fell in love with the tightrope, got addicted to getting high wired ...
One was watching the other day a red-tailed hawk, high in the heavens, circling effortlessly, without a beat of the wing, just for the fun of flying, just to be sustained by the air-currents. Then it was joined by another, and they were flying togeth...
What followed was a great treat for me. This was Irish traditional music as I had hoped to see and hear it, spontaneous and from the heart, and not produced for the sake of the tourist industry. As I sat there with my pint in my hand, enjoying the ji...
