The more adept we become at feeling love and gratitude for all life’s earthly learning experiences, the more quickly we are reminded that, whatever hardship may be placed before us, it is our choice always to return to a place of love and gratitude...
Your silence exists as does my self gathering. But so does the almost absolute silence of the world's dawning. In such suspension, before every utterance on earth, there is a cloud, an almost immobile air. The plants already breathe, while we still a...
Ultima came to stay with us the summer I was almost seven. When she came the beauty of the llano unfolded before my eyes, and the gurgling waters of the river sang to the hum of the turning earth. The magical time of childhood stood still, and the pu...
I've spent most of my life and most of my friendships holding my breath and hoping that when people get close enough they won't leave, and fearing that it's a matter of time before they figure me out and go.
The problem with living forever, of course, is you have to live forever before you know you're immortal...or invincible. Even the gods, in this way, must always remain uncertain. Time trumps immortality just as uncertainty trumps omniscience, for a k...
I fell in love with Erica Kane the summer before my freshman year of high school. Like all red-blooded teen American boys, I'd come home from water polo practice and eat a box of Entenmann's Pop'Ems donut holes in front of the TV while obsessively fa...
As a kid, I was always mistaken for a girl. Before you reach that age where your sexuality starts to display itself, kids can look very androgynous, and I guess I leaned more toward the feminine. All those things were very hard, growing up, because y...
It takes a while to master the art of hammock-lounging. At first I could only manage five minutes or so before I thought I ought to get out and go and help a child learn how to swim or something. But after observing the Mexicans' capability for stari...
Sometimes, we try to run so fast that we can’t see the dangers until we have them before us. We don’t see the tiger hiding in the trees until it is about to eat us. Or we run pass the next opportunity without paying attention.
It's just that you're about to do something out of the ordinary. And after you do something like that, the everyday look of things might seem to change a little. Things may look different to you than they did before. But don't let appearances fool yo...
Some people have the innate ability to cheat artfully during dating, interview... Once they're in, they completely change and become different that they leave you wonder whether you have ever met them before.
I put Chap Stick on before I read, because my lips move along with my eyes. Maybe when I’m a stronger reader, and can read such lofty literary classics such as “The Cat In The Hat,” I won’t need to protect my sensitive lips anymore.
I delete the picture of him from my phone; I delete his number. I think that if I just delete him enough, it will be like none of it ever happened and my heart won't hurt so badly
What is it about Paris that I just can’t keep my hands off of you?” I ask him in between kisses. “It has nothing to do with Paris and everything to do with my raw sexuality, baby. I’m fucking irresistible,” he growls just before he shoves h...
To be selfless, you would give charity anonymously, walj softly on the earth, and look out for others-even total strangers-before you look out for yourself. For the Arab mind, the self is an obstacle, an impediment, in humanity's quest foe real progr...
It was the first and only fight of his childhood, but it had taught him a valuable lesson about human nature, how people were just another species of animal, and like any animal, from the biggest predators, to the smallest scavengers, most human bein...
It dawned on him—as it hadn’t before; he was dense, he was slow—that his parents were five hundred miles away. They could make him come home, they could refuse to pay the portion of his tuition they’d agreed to pay, but they couldn’t see hi...
Dear Reader, This book you hold is a treasure, of sorts, as is every book I have ever known. I have made it for you – especially you – for reasons you will understand as my words unfurl before your eyes. Turn these pages tenderly. You hold my lif...
The leaving happened slowly, gradually, as these things do, and before we knew it, we were lost to each other, as if a magician had whisked a cloth off the table, leaving the dishes there, jolted. And when we looked back it was all a blur, time on fa...
Yet that grief and this joy were alike outside all the ordinary conditions of life; they were loop-holes, as it were, in that ordinary life through which there came glimpses of something sublime. And in the contemplation of this sublime something the...
On the day Princess Diana died, a group of students had gathered before a lecture, talking about what they had heard on the radio that morning, repeating “paparazzi” over and over, all sounding knowing and cocksure, until, in a lull, Okoli Okafor...
