I looked her up and down. She wouldn’t meet my eyes. I didn’t recognize her anymore. She was nothing like the image of her I had in my head. Her features meant nothing to me; she was someone else.
The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin...
Mandy loved the smell of a sunny day after a night of rain. The sun hit the orange puddles, the overgrown, soft, green grass on her lawn, and it beamed down through the orange steel mill smog, sending otherworldly, bizarre shadows across the concrete...
If there'd been an astronaut on the moon right then, I'm sure I could have seen him. Perhaps he could have looked down and seen me too... the only one who could.
In the deepest places, where physical norms collapse under the crushing water, bodies still fall softly through the dark, days after their vessels have capsized. They decay on their long journey down. Nothing will hit the black sand at the bottom of ...
And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us of time's malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing - until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return.
The music, the prayers, the bowing and rising, the incense--all of it was breaking down my defenses. That's what good liturgy does. It breaks your heart open and turns you toward God.
Rosy waited as long as she dared then sat forward and let her eye rove Franny’s lounge, up and down the shelves, looking for something, not even sure she could bring herself to act if she saw it again, already convinced this was her worst ever idea
B looked down the shaft, at a metal ladder and darkness beyond. "Me first?" Of course. You're the apprentice, so you always go first into the unknown. If anyone's going to be eaten by a grue, it should be you." Tough job. But at least the hours are t...
...I really did "choose" to be Jim every single day, but that once I put my sword down I haven't chosen Jenny at all; I simply wake up and here I am.
He impressed people. Unconsciously. Some people are like that. I'm not. There's something in those people that breaks down all the barriers, because they act completely the way they are, have nothing to hide, never shelter behind anything, are just t...
I begin to cry as my walls of my resolve break down. I don't know how long I can hold on. The pain is horrid and I curl into myself wrestling with a wish to die and a wish to live. Both have their perks. Only one will release me from this agony.
We'll when he lets his guard down he's okay. Like when he just talks without checking his words or you catch him just looking at something like... He's really looking for the beauty in it.
It was as though committing murders had purged him of lesser rudeness. Or perhaps, Starling thought, it excited him to see her marked in this particular way. She couldn't tell. The sparks in his eyes flew into his darkness like fireflies down a cave.
But when they began handing out doctorates for comparative folk dancing and advanced fly-fishing, I became too stink in’ proud to use the title. I won’t touch watered whiskey and I take no pride in watered-down degrees.
Wanderers eastward, wanderers west, Know you why you cannot rest? 'Tis that every mother's son Travails with a skeleton. Lie down in the bed of dust; Bear the fruit that bear you must; Bring the eternal seed to light, And morn is all the same as nigh...
i also dislike people who try to talk down to my understanding. they are like people who when walking with you try to shorten their steps to suit yours, hypocrisy in both cases is equally exasperating.
For somewhere," said Poirot to himself, indulging in an absolute riot of mixed metaphors, "there is in the hay a needle, and among the sleeping dogs there is one on whom I shall put my foot, and by shooting the arrows into the air, one will come down...
And it makes you think. Even things that have been the same for years and years can change. Maybe I can change. I can bring my own wall down, and let people in.
But how can you be there for someone who doesn't need you? It's like trying to scale a wall without anyone on the top throwing you a rope. You just keep sliding down and eventually your muscles give out, and your energy and your will and your heart.
I went back to those graves not long afterward and found as I stood there that sadness was a very heavy thing. My body weighed twice what it had only a moment earlier, as if those graves were pulling me down toward them.
