So Mo began filling the silence with words. He lured them out of the pages as if they had only been waiting for his voice, words long and short, words sharp and soft, cooing, purring words. They danced through the room, painting stained glass picture...
We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century - the blindness about which posterity will ask, "But how could they have thought that?" - lies where we have never suspected it... None of us can fully escape this blindness, b...
People accuse me of having interiorized a feeling of racial inferiority, so that I attack my own culture out of self-hatred, because I want to be white. This is a tiresome argument. Tell me, is freedom then only for white people? Is it self-love to a...
Oh yes", said the old woman, "but I've heard these so-called stoves are by no means all they are supposed to be. I never saw a stove in my day, and yet never ailed a thing, at least as long as I could really be called alive, except for nettle rash on...
I was beginning to understand something I couldn't articulate. It was a jazzy feeling in my chest, a fluttering, a kind of buzzing in my brain. Warmth. Life. The circulation of blood. Sanguinity. I don't know. I understood the enormous risk of tellin...
I could feel my insides sink. My knees too. So I sat on the ground, against the wall, letting it support me. I thought I knew what heartbreak felt like. I thought heartbreak was me, standing alone at the prom. That was nothing. This, this was heartbr...
She felt the cold blast from the sterile air conditioning on her bare arms and thighs, as she ambled down the center of the shopping complex's ground floor. The scene was a swirl of candy bright lights--the Victoria's Secret fuchsia signboard, signbo...
She quickly realized she had an affinity for the older books and their muted scents of past dinners and foreign countries, the tea and chocolate stains coloring the phrases. You could never be certain what you would find in a book that has spent time...
Erlendur didn’t believe in premonitions, visions or dreams, nor reincarnation or karma, he didn’t believe in God although he’d often read the Bible, nor in eternal life or that his conduct in this world would affect whether he went to heaven or...
In principle, to be sure, the Reformation idea of the universal priesthood of all believers meant that not only the clergy but also the laity, not only the theologian but also the magistrate, had the capacity to read, understand, and apply the teachi...
Everything we think we know is really only perceived by our senses,' he explains patiently. 'The sounds we hear are just waves in the air; colors are electromagnetic radiation; your sense of taste comes from molecules that match a specific area on yo...
And he knew he would not be travelling home. If he had to wear a donkey jacket and wait for fifty years, then he would wait. At last there was a place in the world where he had reason to be, a place that had meaning. For days, without realising it, h...
I had seen that once before, bleeding water. A little baby I worked on as a resident in training. That poor kid had been shot as well—his father had blasted away the top of his head with a shotgun—and we couldn't begin to stop the bloodletting in...
At the root of the tree at the heart of the world, With a chain round his neck, the Wolf lies curled. His gleaming teeth and jaws are furled, And the sun shall rise in the morning. His chain, it is forged of the nerve of a bear, Of the voice of a fis...
I laughed but before I could agree with the hairdressers that she was crazy, she said, 'What's the world for if you can't make it up the way you want it?' " 'The way I want it?' " 'Yeah. The way you want it. Don't you want it to be something more tha...
God knew man would evolve. People think some of the Old Testament laws are absurd now because we live in a very different culture, a different time period. They had their problems and we have ours. God is constant but man is not, and he foreknew the ...
The great point in Christianity is the search for an independent content for spiritual life which, according to the insights of its founder, could be elevated, not by the forces of a world external to the soul of man, but by the revelation of a new w...
I know what's wrong with me - I could never stand still for death! Which you've got to do by a certain age, or be ridiculous - you've got to stand there nobly and serene, and let death run his tape on your arms and around your belly and up your crotc...
When I was twelve I was obsessed. Everything was sex. Latin was sex. The dictionary fell open at 'meretrix', a harlot. You could feel the mystery coming off the word like musk. 'Meretrix'! This was none of your mensa-a-table, this was a flash from a ...
His deep voice drifted to her through the crowd of women. “…my lady when she returns. Och, there ye are, Blossom,” Faolán grinned, standing up and taking her hand so she could ease back into the restaurant booth. “These lasses were just aski...
The coach passed by many buildings of this sort, which would no doubt be little palaces to the occupants, who had escaped from Cockbill Street and Pigsty Hill and all the other neighbourhoods where people still dreamed that they could ‘better thems...
