...we begin to understand marriage as the insistently practical union that it is. We begin to understand it, that is, as it is represented in the traditional marriage ceremony, those vows being only a more circumstantial and practical way of saying w...
, that's what people say. No one ever mentions how girls have to be something other than themselves altogether. We are to stifle the same feelings that boys are encouraged to display. We are to use gossip as a means of policing ourselves -- this way ...
The careful observations and the acute reasonings of the Italian geologists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; the speculations of in the 'Protogaea' and of in his 'Théorie de la Terre;' the sober and profound reasonings of , in the latter...
That's because true travel, the kind with no predetermined end, is one of the most selfish endeavors we can possibly undertake-an act in which we focus solely on our own fulfillment, with little regard to those we leave behind. After all, we're the o...
You meet me after school right here", I said. "Why?" he asked. I couldn't believe he was so stupid. "Because we're going to finish this fight." "You're crazy," Roger said. He got to his feet and walked away. His gang stared at me like I was a serail ...
After much effort to live up to a glorious standard there came fatigue, wan hope, and boredom. I experienced extreme boredom. I saw others experiencing it too, many denying, by the way, that any such thing existed. And finally I decided that I would ...
Joshua Joseph has no real hatred of modern technology - he just mistrusts the effortless, textureless surfaces, and the ease with which it trains you to do things in the way most convenient to the machine. Above all, he mistrusts duplication. A rare ...
Human beings across every culture I know about require such stories, stories with cool winds and wood smoke. They speak to something deep within us, the capacity to conceptualize, objectify and find patterns, thereby to create the flow of events and ...
Communication between people of different nationalities enriches human society and makes it more colourful.. Imagine our Russian intellectuals, the kind, merry, perceptive old women in our villages, our elderly workers, our young lads, our little gir...
You think that the world we live in is ordinary. We make noise and static to fill the empty spaces where ghosts live. We let other people grow our food, bleach our clothes. We seal ourselves in, clean the dirt from our skins, eat of animals whose blo...
Family myths are cherished by the people who--however unwittingly--have brought them into being. In my own situation, what my father was really saying to me during that last unfortunate phone call was that I had shattered our family's myth: the myth ...
How can you regret never having found true love? That's like saying you regret not being born a genius. People don't have control over such things. It either happens or it doesn't. It's a gift - a present that most never get. It's more like a miracle...
If we stay where we are, where we're stuck, where we're comfortable and safe, we die there. We become like mushrooms, living in the dark, with poop up to our chins. If you want to know only what you already know, you're dying. You're saying: Leave me...
Oh, crap. The last person she wanted to run into this morning when she had to be super-professional was Hot Pool Guy. Before she had a chance to hide behind a plant or something, his gaze connected with hers and held her hostage. He flashed a smile a...
I'm serious, Harry, don't go." But Harry only had one thought in his head, which was to get back in front of the mirror, and Ron wasn't going to stop him. That third night he found his way more quickly than before. He was walking so fast he knew he w...
Ian didn't come. He just sat here with you--he said he didn't care what you looked like. He wouldn't let anyone else put a finger on your tank at all, not even me or Mel. But Doc let me watch this time. It was way cool, Wanda. I don't know why you wo...
You monosyllabic Neanderthal, I am not some little helpless female who can't walk across the brewery." He shrugged. "I did what was needed." "What the what?" She dropped the clipboard from beneath the hoodie and shoved her arms through its sleeves be...
My mother showed her gratitude for her life in exile by alluding to India’s modernity: the expansive railway network; the Bollywood movies she came to love for their tumultuous stories which ultimately conceded to the cardinal guidelines she held i...
… in these new days and in these new pages a philosophical tradition of the spontaneity of speculation kind has been rekindled on the sacred isle of Éire, regardless of its creative custodian never having been taught how to freely speculate, how t...
Perhaps this war will make it simpler for us to go back to some of the old ways we knew before we came over to this land and made the Big Money. Perhaps, even, we will remember how to make good bread again. It does not cost much. It is pleasant: one ...
Genealogy becomes a mania, an obsessive struggle to penetrate the past and snatch meaning from an infinity of names. At some point the search becomes futile – there is nothing left to find, no meaning to be dredged out of old receipts, newspaper ar...
