Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? You leave the previous book with ideas and themes–characters even–caught in the fibers of your clothes, and when you o...
From the days of old, those who walk in the way have replaced those who deviate therefrom; those who lack virtue have fallen before those who possess it. Can one escape fate?
I journeyed alone for almost ten years before I found home. Adoptions are like very delicate gardening with transplants and grafts. Mine took hold, rooted, and bloomed, even though there were inevitable adjustments to the new soil and climate. Yet I ...
Within moments she stood naked before him,aside from her garters and stockings. "Why is it that ye always strip me bare but leave these things on?" she asked absently as he stepped back to work at his own clothing. "To give you something to complain ...
Things keep happening all around you. There is violence, there is gore, there are people who will use you and never look back to see what became of you, and worse, there are people who will break you into smithereens before they leave to make sure th...
As I have pointed out before, characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something e...
Before I saw you, I hadn’t cared for anyone for . . . well, for the good part of a century, and it felt like my heart had been permanently disconnected. I wasn’t even looking anymore. And without expecting anything . . . without any hope at all, ...
He owned an expensive camera that required thought before you pressed the shutter, and I quickly became his favorite subject, round-faced, missing teeth, my thick bangs in need of a trim. They are still the pictures of myself I like best, for they co...
I don’t want any of this. I just want to be what I was before you showed up here and all hell broke loose. I want to be popular and dating the hottest guy in school. Now I’m none of those things, and I’m a human who has scary visions and don’...
Eventually it will become quiet enough so that you can simply watch the heart begin to react, and let go before the mind starts. At some point in the journey it all becomes heart, not mind. ... The mind doesn’t even get a chance to start up because...
Why aren't you afraid of me?" Coy looks at me, baffled. "Why would I be afraid of you?" I shrug, not getting a chance to answer before he continues. "Until the day you start chomping on my throat without my permission or throwing me across the room f...
I began to long, as I had before, for some special smell, some special music that would fill me, lift me up and carry me away, float me off the rocks of my body and sweep me into some wideness, some vast expanse of blue-grey nothingness.
To look back before 1800 is to enter another world, one where the number of institutions for the mad was a tiny fraction of today's and what we would now call mental disorders were often understood as religious ecstasies or diabolical possessions.
The clandestine operation tucked several floors below ground level inside a Los Angeles high-rise had never before made her queasy. Today the copper walls, marble flooring, refrigerated temperature and minimal furnishings took discomfort to a new lev...
After a moment, he found my neck, kissing the nape, his teeth grazing my skin and causing me to make a small noise very much like a whimper. Before I could take another breath, his lips met mine and I was lost to his touch.
I always smile when I think of him, and when I see his doppelgängers I rubberneck to get a look. Then allow myself to dissolve into a serene, secret little smile as that feeling takes over. Is it possible to fall in love with someone you've only met...
Come closer, my dears, let me give you a warning, Of the fate that befalls those who stay out past morning, In the darkest hours before the dawn, When witches roam and demons spawn, And children die with spirit gone, Magicked away in the gloaming.
I know you didn’t see the violence and need for control in him in the beginning, but I’m sure it was there. Nothing you did turned him into such an abusive man. And you … well, you just didn’t see your own value before that. It’s an easy th...
A truly good book is something as natural, and as unexpectedly and unaccountably fair and perfect, as a wild-flower discovered on the prairies of the West or in the jungles of the East. Genius is a light which makes the darkness visible, like the lig...
My head and shoulders melted first, followed by my hips and knees. Before long I was a puddle, soaking into the pretty cotton prints. I drenched the quilt she never finished, rusted the metal parts of her sewing machine. I was pure liquid loss...
I remember sitting in this cabin in Alaska one evening reading over the notes of all these encounters, and recalling Joseph Campbell, who wrote in the conclusion to 'Primitive Mythology' that men do not discover their gods, they create them. So do th...
