Christmas is not something that sprang from the musings of some person who creatively devised caricatures of elves, spiraling candy canes, visions of a magical city whose foundation was nestled in the far reaches of the North Pole, or embellishments ...
And as Rhonda told the story, she thought: this is how the past gets passed down. This is how memories are made. Half-invented, embellished, given a touch of whimsy. Daniel would be a saint now that he was dead. A beautiful man who made his child win...
The whole point of crying was to quit before you cornied it up. The whole point of grief itself was to cut it out while it was still honest, while it still meant something. Because the thing was so easily corrupted, let yourself go and you started em...
The sublime can only be found in the great subjects. Poetry, history and philosophy all have the same object, and a very great object—Man and Nature. Philosophy describes and depicts Nature. Poetry paints and embellishes it. It also paints men, it ...
When he recalls it in later years, he will wonder if he is distorting it, embellishing it, because each time he consciously recalls her, that forms a new memory, a new imprint to be stacked on top of the previous one. He fears that too much handling ...
Over the years the Indian leadership, and the educated Indian, have deliberately projected and embellished an image about Indians that they know to be untrue, and have wilfully encouraged the well-meaning but credulous foreign observer to accept it. ...
On the whole, lying is a cheerful affair. Embellishments are intended to give pleasure. People long to tell you what they imagine you want to hear. They want to amuse you; they want to amuse themselves; they want to show you a good time. This is beyo...
God presents His works embellished with color, meaning, and content in order to make Himself known and loved to those seeking Him. We are sent to this world with the responsibility, then, to affect and reshape things with His permission, to reflect o...
How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told abo...
The clarity was startling and Samson wondered whether he was imagining these moments. Not that they hadn't happened at all, but that they had been embellished by details from elsewhere, fragments that survived the obliteration of other memories, vagr...
Brant had said my embellishing constituted a disservice to history and its players. But I believed the opposite. Marooning them on the forlorn island of Only What We Know, a place whose boundaries were determined by the scant information provided by ...
True poetry is composed of metaphors and symbols which are born in the heart, rise like clouds, and assume a celestial form; verses formed otherwise are not poetry, but only artificial words, each of which contradicts the feelings inside. The utteran...
Appetite knows what it craves, without cerebral embellishment. It tends not to waste any time laying hold of its tools. That was the thing I had recognised here: appetite. I recognised it precisely because, in a context like this, it was so unfamilia...
Animals hold us to what is present: to who we are at the time, not who we’ve been or how are bank accounts describe us. What’s obvious to an animal is not the embellishment that fattens our emotional resumes but what’s bedrock and current in us...
He had a ruggedness about him that was appealing. Despite his groomed presentation, his chiseled face was shadowed with an attractive scruff of hair. His beautiful smile burned into me, melting me from the inside out while it exposed perfect white te...
A garden path,' write the landscape architects Charles W. Moore, William J. Mitchell, and William Turnbull, 'can become the thread of a plot, connecting moments and incidents into a narrative. The narrative structure might be a simple chain of events...
You know, the immortality of the soul, free will and all that -- it's all very amusing to talk about up to the age of twenty-two, but not after that. Then one ought to be giving one's mind to having fun without catching the pox, arranging one's life ...
What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms – in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical...
We are like children building a sand castle. We embellish it with beautiful shells, bits of driftwood, and pieces of colored glass. The castle is ours, off limits to others. We’re willing to attack if others threaten to hurt it. Yet despite all our...
We fluff them and fold them and nudge them and enhance them and bind them and break them and embellish them beyond measure; then, as we drive them up to the college interviews that they’ve heard since birth are the gateway to the lives they were de...
I am quite scandalous, you see. I come packaged with unpredictable moments, brutal honesty, calamitous outbursts, the ghastly need for love, a fiendish lack of filter, the horrific need to question everything, nauseating affection, offensive kindness...
