When I'd begun my last relationship, nearly two decades ago, I'd been unaware of the rule that new lovers must hoard the 'L Word' the way atomic nations hoard their explosives, like something that, once detonated, would change their world forever.
It's hard at times, but it makes a kid strong in ways that most people can't understand. Teaches them that even though people are left behind, new ones will inevitable take their place; that every place has something good - and bad - to offer. It mak...
Teaching is the art of serendipity. Each of us has the experience of finding out that something we intended as only the most casual of remarks, or the stray example, changes the way some students thought to the point of changing their lives.
A wall is a defense of a country that values inaction. But a wall imprisons the people of a country as much as it protects them. That's why Balthasar had us go this way. He wanted me to see the error in the Tao. One can't be free without action.
Everything that highly educated men can do to obscure a simple truth, to make a woman doubt her feelings, to make her own thoughts a muddle, they do to her. They use their learning as a hurdle to herd her one way and then the other and then finally t...
Moreover, there was what Amy called “the cocksuckers’ contingent of the country”—what Danny knew as the dumber-than-dog-shit element, those bully patriots—and they were too set in their ways or too poorly educated (or both) to see beyond th...
Statues look like people, but people shouldn’t act like statues—you know, be set in their ways like stone. I make love like a sculptor paints, minus the wine, plus the grape juice. Suck me like a straw, rubber band legs.
A little hatred goes a long, long way. It grows and grows. And it’s hungry. You keep feeding it more and more people, and the more it gets, the more it wants. It’s never satisfied. And pretty soon it squeezes all the love out of your heart and al...
Rosa had achieved the sort of serene and confident happiness that Tamsin had never really known. She was connected to Roberto in a way that made Tamsin long for something similar. A man with whom she could share all parts of her life, someone to be h...
Thinking of the stars night after night I begin to realize 'The stars are words' and all the innumerable worlds in the Milky Way are words, and so is this world too. And I realize that no matter where I am, whether in a little room full of thought, o...
If she loved him the way she said she did, she wanted him whole. Maybe this was what love meant after all: sacrifice and selflessness. It did not mean hearts and flowers and a happy ending, but the knowledge that another's well-being is more importan...
Man (and woman) has an infinite capacity for self-development. Equally, he has an infinite capacity for self-destruction. A human being may be clinically alive and yet, despite all appearances, spiritually dead.
He was falling between glacial walls, he didn't know how anyone could fall so far away from everyone else in the world. So far to fall, so cold all the way, so steep and dark between those morphine-coloured walls...
This is the Modern Man. The man who seeks himself without ever seeking, because he does not want to find; The man who does not hesitate to criticize the other, although he behaves in the same way;
Phoebe doesn't quite believe in fate the way I do. She says you have to your destiny, and she always expects life to be like a romantic comedy: all you have to do is dress the part of the heroine, and pretty soon you'll be kissing some hottie while f...
You know," she said, stirring her tea, "the fastest way to get him off your back is to sleep with him. And tell him you love him. Preferably while in bed." I smirked and the tea almost came out of my nose. "He'd run like he was on fire.
When I mentioned the notion of “playing hard to get,” it wasn’t intended as encouragement. Ignoring me will not change how I feel about you. It’s a familiar enough situation, after all. You pass by – I hope you’ll notice me watching – y...
They began by controlling books of cartoons and then detective books and, of course, films, one way or another, one group or another, political bias, religious prejudice, union pressure; there was always a minority afraid of something, and a great ma...
Delphine witnessed awful things occurring to other humans. Worse than that, she was powerless to alter their fate. It would be that way all her life--disasters, falling like chairs all around her, falling so close they disarranged her hair, but not t...
The way he looked at me, I felt as though he saw through my body and directly into my soul. No one had ever made me feel like that before. Then again, I had never met someone so electrically good-looking, but there's a first time for everything.
Sally laughed. "When you first told me you were interested in Decebel, I honestly thought that there was no way you two would ever work. But man, you are both such freaks, I honestly don't think anyone else could put up with either of you." "Or keep ...