I have been able to be kind and pleasant to him because every time I think of what happened in Erudite headquarters, I immediately push the thought aside. But that can't be forgiveness - if I had forgiven him, I would be able to think of what happene...
We all colour devotion according to our own likings and dispositions. One man sets great value on fasting, and believes himself to be leading a very devout life, so long as he fasts rigorously, although the while his heart is full of bitterness;–an...
With an ashamed sigh, I confessed, “You have seen nothing but the worst of me since then, Aeron. I’ve been a bitter, defiant, irrational shrew…and now I’m selfishly dragging you into a hopeless situation against your better judgment. What wou...
And except on a certain kind of winter evening—six-thirty in the Seventies, say, already dark and bitter with a wind off the river, when I would be walking very fast toward a bus and would look in the bright windows of brownstones and see cooks wor...
Facts count. Conspiracy theories, usually the refuge of the bitter or disempowered, range from factually challenged to wildly hallucinogenic. Conspiracy theories are not harmless entertainment, or a laudable facet of the freedom of speech. Conspiracy...
Man doeth this and doeth that from the good or evil of his heart; but he knows not to what end his sense doth prompt him; for when he strikes he is blind to where the blow shall fall, nor can he count the airy threads that weave the web of circumstan...
I endured all our hardships as if they had been luxuries: I made light of scurvy, banqueted off train-oil, and met that cold for which there is no language framed, and which might be a new element; or which, rather, had seemed in that long night like...
Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety. And at such a moment, unable to see and not daring to imagine what the future will now bring forth, one clings ...
As a child there's a horror in discovering the limitations of the ones you love. The time you find that your mother cannot keep you safe, that your tutor makes a mistake, that the wrong path must be taken because the grown-ups lack the strength to ta...
The shrub that half concealed her was a malignant plant, a Madagascan tanghin tree with wide, box-like leaves with whitish stems, whose smallest veins distilled a venomous fluid. At a moment when Louise and Maxime laughed more loudly in the reflected...
...this refinement and delicacy were what Cale adored; but Cale had been beaten into shape, hammered in dreadful fires of fear and pain. How could she be with him for long? A secret part of Arbell had been searching for some time for a way to leave h...
Let us admit, without bitterness, that the individual has his distinct interests and can, without felony, stipulate for those interests and defend them. The present has its pardonable amount of egotism; momentary life has its claims, and cannot be ex...
The very next day, we were told that Abigail had had a massive stroke. She was alive, but the woman we had known had vanished. She did not know where she was or who she was. The alarm clock had gone off. The very old languish and die. We know that, b...
So, what do you do when you know you have two days to live? Eat an entire Bitter Chocolate Death cake all by myself. Reread my favorite novel. Buy eight dozen roses from the best florist in town--the super expensive ones, the ones that smell like ros...
The nearest arched window poured its soft light over him, allowing me to see every inch. Dressed smartly in black loafers and slacks, he wore a thigh-length, black coat. He'd brushed his golden hair back, tucked behind his ears, and his cheeks looked...
In fact her maturity and blood kinship converted her passion to fever, so it was more affliction than affection. It literally knocked her down at night, and raised her up in the morning, for when she dragged herself off to bed, having spent another d...
I know it. I know I shall make beastly mistakes, Father-" "The world does not forgive mistakes so quickly, my girl." He sounds bitter and sad. "If the world will not forgive me," I say softly, "I shall have to learn to forgive myself." He nods in und...
The past gathered out of the darkness where it stayed, and the dead raised themselves to live before him; and the past and the dead flowed into the present among the alive, so that he had for an intense instant a vision of denseness into which he was...
Her time has come," answered Miss Lizzie. "That's why I didn't marry Harvey - long ago when he asked me. I was afraid of 'that'. So afraid." "I don't know," Miss Lizzie said. "Sometimes I think it's better to suffer bitter unhappiness and to fight an...
The last great escape. I was done gambling, done betting on a ship that would never come in. I would cash in my chips while I was ahead. I didn't want to suffer the growing old, didn't want to wait until my memory went. It was all so tiresome. I woul...
To be cynical is to be distant. While offering a false intimacy of being "in the know," cynicism actually destroys intimacy. It leads to a creeping bitterness that can deaden and even destroy the spirit... A praying life is just the opposite. It enga...
