This funny thing happens when you graduate college. You hear so much about being an adult that you start to feel like you have to become a different person overnight, that growing up means being not you. And you concentrate so hard on living up to th...
So . . . what is this fire river called?” “The Phlegethon,” [Annabeth] said. “You should concentrate on going down.” “The ?” [Percy] shinnied along the ledge. They’d made it roughly a third of the way down the cliff—still high enoug...
Le Corbusier was the sort of relentlessly rational intellectual that only France loves wholeheartedly, the logician who flies higher and higher in ever-decreasing concentric circles until, with one last, utterly inevitable induction, he disappears up...
The worst of such stories is that the triumphant romancers can always be put to confusion and crushed by the very details in which real life is so rich and which these unhappy and involuntary story-tellers neglect as insignificant trifles. Oh, they h...
We can learn to pay attention, concentrate, devote ourselves to authors. We can slow down so we can hear the voice of texts, feel the movement of sentences, experience the pleasure of words--and own passages that speak to us. (p. 41)
How paltry are the traces left behind by a life, even one concentrated around those supposed things of permanence called words. We spend our time upon the earth and then disappear, and only one one-thousandth of what we were lasts. We send all those ...
The cotton was open and spilling into the fields; the very air smelled of it. In field after field as he passed along the pickers, arrested in stooping attitudes, seemed fixed amid the constant surf of bursting bolls like piles in surf, the long, par...
That sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like, hurt. That you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do. That there is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindn...
Yeah, I was just curious. I concentrated on my footsteps. Yeah, well, next time you think about stepping into rock concerts you might want to bring a bodyguard. I stopped and turned around. I brought my hands to my hips, a bit offended. What is that ...
From mirror to mirror — this is what I happen to dream of — the totality of things, the whole, the entire universe, divine wisdom could concentrate their luminous rays into a single mirror. Or perhaps the knowledge of everything is buried in the ...
What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. Whether I’m online or not, my mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I w...
To the untutored sage, the concentration of population was the prolific mother of all evils, moral no less than physical. He argued that food is good, while surfeit kills; that love is good, but lust destroys; and not less dreaded than the pestilence...
What are you doing?" my mom asked. One side of her mouth curled up. "I'm trying to move that cup." My parents laughed. I concentrated on the coffee cup, but it didn't budge. "I guess I'll have to work on this telekinesis thing. It'll come in handy wh...
Few travelled in these days, for, thanks to the advance of science, the earth was exactly alike all over. Rapid intercourse, from which the previous civilization had hoped so much, had ended by defeating itself. What was the good of going to Peking w...
Coping with any death is traumatic; suicide compounds the anguish because we are forced to deal with two traumatic events at the same time. According to the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, t...
Sometime in high school it dawned on me that perhaps I was a little different...I realized music wasn't swirling in the minds of my friends drowning out conversations and making it difficult to concentrate in class. I concluded I had a some sort of m...
Dain kept his gaze on his plate and concentrated on swallowing the morsel he'd just very nearly choked on. She was possessive... about him. The beautiful, mad creature - or blind and deaf creature, or whatever she was - coolly announced it as one mig...
Such planetary alignments are thought to lead to local miasmas: concentrations of fetid air and noxious vapors. These miasmas are then blown on the wind and enter men's and women's bodies through the pores of their skin. once inside they disrupt the ...
The physical sciences, good and innocent in themselves, had already... begun to be warped, had been subtly manoeuvred in a certain direction. Despair of objective truth had been increasingly insinuated into the scientists; indifference to it, and a c...
When you do something, you should do it with your whole body and mind; you should be concentrated on what you do. You should do it completely, like a good bonfire. You should not be a smoky fire. You should burn yourself completely. If you do not bur...
Francesca took a navy blue sheath from a hanger and held it up. "This is darling, Gabriel. Don't you love it? You're right, I think we need to concentrate on much more feminine articles of clothing." He reached around her and fingered the soft materi...
