Men who are afraid to feel must keep women around to do their feeling for them while dismissing us for the same supposedly "inferior" capacity to feel deeply. But in this way also, men deny themselves their own essential humanity, becoming trapped in...
We each have a special something we can get only at a special time of our life. like a small flame. A careful, fortunate few cherish that flame, nurture it, hold it as a torch to light their way. But once that flame goes out, it’s gone forever.
...I told her that letting go is not a choice, in many ways. You try to move on, perhaps. But it comes of its own accord, in the end; it happens when it is ready to, and it mostly comes by without announcement or being noticed at all. , I tell her.
...I like the way Chee kept God magical, sorta like Santa Claus when you're a kid. More priests should take this approach, because there is a frickin' reason why Santa Claus is more popular than Jesus nowadays.
After defending the value of prepared prayers, the author cautions against over-reliance on them. Just as David could not fight in the armor of King Saul, we are called to fight in the way God has equipped us uniquely.
Only, it’s not an it. It’s a her. A zombie. A woman. A zombie woman. She’s older than Janine, closer to my age, maybe early thirties, missing a little bit of her face, but otherwise sort of pretty in a melancholy way.
I wanted to see everything. It was around the time I acquired language, or even before that time, when something happened that changed my relationship to the spin of the world. My concept of language, of what was possible with music was changed by th...
I could not resist the in books, the incredibly satisfying way in which life became weighty and accessible. Books were reality. I hadn't made up my own mind about my own life, a vague, dreamy affair, amorphous and dimly perceived, without beginning o...
Television and cinema were all very well, but these stories happened to other people. The stories I found in books happened inside my head. I was, in some way, there. It's the magic of fiction: you take the words and you build them into worlds.
Just because life is hard, and always ends in a bad way, doesn't mean that all stories have to, even if that's what they tell us in school and in the New York Times Review. In fact, it's a good thing that stories are as different as we are, one from ...
Life isn’t fair. It doesn’t make sense. This unfairness is felt by everyone, from the Las Vegas tunnel dweller all the way to the executive in the high-rise. To some, these “unfair” experiences become a chastening ball and chain attached for ...
She shelled the nuts and toasted them, jiggling them about in the pan. She sprinkled them with salt and ate them each by each. Some were bitter. Some were sweet. Some were hardly anything. That was just the way of things.
This is the real Madame. I can see why she hides herself in accents and gems and exotic perfumes. I can see why she's grown to hate anything to do with love. She isn't evil or corrupt the way that Vaughn is. She's broken. Only broken.
We were his disposable things. Brought to him like cattle. Stripped of what made us sisters or daughters or children. There was nothing that he could take from us—our genes, our bones, our wombs—that would ever satisfy him. There was no other way...
In its timeless capacity to embody the human condition, the vampire is a poignant metaphor describing the psychosocial experience of the pariah - the outsider. The vampire is the Other that used to be human. The diseased, the mentally challenged, the...
He was one of that class of men who, apart from a scientific career in which they may well have proved brilliantly successful, have acquired an entirely different kind of culture, literary or artistic, for which their professional specialisation has ...
Swann could at once detect in this story one of those fragments of literal truth which liars, when taken by surprise, console themselves by introducing into the composition of the falsehood which they have to invent, thinking that it can be safely in...
... the good intentions of a third party are powerless to control a woman who is annoyed to find herself pursued even into a ball-room by a man whom she does not love. Too often, the kind friend comes down again alone.
... seeking to indicate to her by the extent of his gratitude the corresponding intensity of the pleasures which it was in her power to bestow on him, the supreme pleasure being to guarantee him immunity, for as long as his love should last and he re...
All I could think about was the heat of his soft lips, the way they fitted so wonderfully as I was coaxing him to open them some more, just enough to let my tongue slip in and taste him. I needed a taste, needed to complete this fantasy of mine.
If you take things the wrong way, be aware of which end is up
