Man corrupt everything, say Shug. He on your box of grits, in your head, and all over the radio. He try to make you think he everywhere. Soon as you think he everywhere, you think he God. But he ain't. Whenever you trying to pray, and man plop himsel...
The reason for the existence of the perfection conjured up in these fourteen lines is that it possesses ... the authorization to form a message that appeals from within itself. This power of appeal is exquisitely evident in the object evoked here. Th...
You can neither lie to a neighbourhood park, nor reason with it. 'Artist's conceptions' and persuasive renderings can put pictures of life into proposed neighbourhood parks or park malls, and verbal rationalizations can conjure up users who ought to ...
All right, the universe is energy. All of it. Everything is energy that can be altered simply by willing it to be altered. It's as if we are God's waking dream, each gifted with a small piece of his consciousness; the beauty of that arrangement is th...
Now, sorcery rules the world. Of course, most don't call it sorcery; indeed, many would be horrified by such a notion. Instead, they use words like ideology, politics, defence, security, patriotism, commerce, industry, marketing, consumerism and beli...
Lying is a full time occupation, even if you tell just one, because once you tell it, you're stuck with it. If you want to do it right, you have to visualize it, conjure the graphics, tone, and sequence of action, then relate it purposefully in the m...
And after that, after the awkward shuffling away of that last thin layer of clothes, words retreated to the sounds they once were. We had sex. A happy entanglement of warm limbs and warmer love. A physical and psychological merging that conjured a ki...
Is God-like forgiveness humanly possible? Yes, if it remains God’s work! Forgiveness is not something we can accomplish on our own or within our own power (no more than we make the kingdom of God happen in the world). It’s not something we conjur...
Doing it all the time, whether or not we are in the mood, gives us ownership of our writing ability. It takes it out of the realm of conjuring where we stand on the rock of isolation, begging the winds for inspiration, and it makes it something as do...
Literature had torn Tessa and me apart, or prevented us from merging in the first place. That was its role in the world, I'd started to fear: to conjure up disagreements that didn't matter and inspire people to act on them as though they mattered mor...
I know California isn't a real destination. You can't get there from New Jersey, not simply by following a line drawn on a map. The process of arrival is more subtle and complex. It involves acts of contrition. You must appease the gods. You must fin...
We have too much respect for the printed word, too little awareness of the power words hold over us. We allow worlds to be conjured up for us with very little concern for the implications. We overlook glaring incongruities. We are suckers for alliter...
In a dark layer of Esme's memory there was a kiss. Vividly she recalled Mihai in the snow, naked and fanged. That kiss had conjured ancient passions a god had tried to erase, and Esme remembered the pressure of it and even knew the flavor of that bla...
[Harry has just successfully conjured a Patronus] Professor Lupin: You know something, Harry? I think you would have given your father a run for his money, and THAT is saying something. [beat] Harry: I was thinking of him... and Mum. Seeing their fac...
The forms of the central and surrounding deities... should not be protruding like a clay statue or cast image, yet neither should they be flat like a painting. In contrast, they should be apparent, yet not truly existent, like a rainbow in the sky or...
What part of confidante has that poor teapot played ever since the kindly plant was introduced among us! Why myriads of women have cried over it, to be sure! [...] Nature meant very kindly by women when she made the tea plant; and with a little thoug...
I didn't know what I wanted. Maybe I never had. The emotional distance was never worth the togetherness, and yet I didn't learn. Nothing had changed. Had he reached for me, I would have forgotten to behave sensibly. Desire has no reason, and the need...
Songs and smells will bring you back to a moment in time more than anything else. It's amazing how much can be conjured with a few notes of a song or a solitary whiff of a room. A song you didn't even pay attention to at the time, a place that you di...
I suppose I'd had, by the standards of that pre-permissive time, a good deal of sex for my age. Girls, or a certain kind of girl, liked me; I had a car-not so common among undergraduates in those days-and I had some money. I wasn't ugly; and even mor...
You're different. You're more perfect. Time is three things for most people, but for you, for us, just one. A singularity. One moment. This moment. Like you're the center of the clock, the axis on which the hands turn. Time moves about you but never ...
When returned from Italy he called on Mr. and invited him to dinner: in the course of his rapturous address to him he declared that a statue of gold ought to be erected to him in every city in the universe, assuring him that he always slept with his ...
