I was feverish; I couldn’t keep down food. Orma stayed by me the entire time, and I suffered the illusion that behind his skin—behind everyone’s—was a hollow nothingness, an inky black void. He rolled up my sleeve to look at my arm, and I shr...
He said he’d heard the sound of one hand clapping. He said, once his mind took in the wondrous no-sound of holy oneness, the empty echo of eternal bliss, he was never the same. He could hear it still, he said, resounding in the ether and tickling t...
Nostalgia is a necessary thing, I believe, and a way for all of us to find peace in that which we have accomplished, or even failed to accomplish. At the same time, if nostalgia precipitates actions to return to that fabled, rosy-painted time, partic...
His anger took many shapes: sometimes soft and familiar, like a round stone he had caressed for so long that is was perfectly smooth and polished; sometimes it was thin and sharp like a blade that could slice through anything; sometimes it had the fo...
The truest art I would strive for in any work would be to give the page the same qualities as earth: weather would land on it harshly, light would elucidate the most difficult truths; wind would sweep away obtuse padding. Finally, the lessons of impe...
If you're waiting for me to declare my undying love for you, I can't do that yet, blood-bond or no blood-bond. If you think I'm the swoony type of heroine you find in romance novels, who'll fall into your arms just because you saved me from an altern...
I stare at the pile of discarded remnants and think of my mother. Did she touch that pillar there? Does her scent still linger in a fragment of glass or a splinter of wood? A terrible emptiness settles into my chest. No matter how much I go about liv...
I like music," she said slowly, "because when I hear it, I . . . I lose myself within myself, if that makes any sense. I become empty and full all at once, and I can feel the whole earth roiling around me. When I play. I'm not . . . for once, I'm not...
There ARE people who won't customarily eat an entire row of cookies, or hear food calling their name from other rooms, or who don't grind up food in the garbage disposal for fear of eating it, or get it back out of the garbage so they could eat it. O...
We do not admire, we hardly excuse, the fanatic who wrecks this world for love of the other but what are we to say of the fanatic who wrecks this world out of hatred for the other? He sacrifices the very existence of humanity's to the idleness of the...
Being a monk was the strangest and most perverted way of life imaginable. Monks spent half their lives putting themselves through pain and discomfort that they could easily avoid, and the other half muttering meaningless mumbo jumbo in empty churches...
They become liberated spaces that can be occupied. A rich indetermination gives them, by means of a semantic rarefaction, the function of articulating a second, poetic geography on top of the geography of the literal, forbidden or permitted meaning. ...
Play me something that makes me feel; This soul inside me is made of steel. Brain is breathing, but heart’s not beating And, babe, I need you to make things real. Walk inside me without silence, Kill the past and change the tense. Empty gnawing and...
He had no secrets left. No defenses. He had nothing, except that same vast, dark, empty, infinite ache that had resided in him for as long as he could remember. An endless flight of stairs, leading down and down into the cold, dark pit of his soul. N...
The greatest miracle was that in the end I could actually feel pity for those men because they were so deluded: they thought they had power and really they had nothing. I will never forget it. And from that moment on I've never really hated anymore. ...
Words. Just little black marks on paper. Just sounds in the empty air. But think of the power they have! They can make you laugh or cry, love or hate, fight or run away. They can heal or hurt. They even come to look and sound like what they mean. Ang...
We have an internal check and balance system. By design we are so filled with possibility, opportunity, with greatness that when we live small, within the bottom of our capability, we innately know we should be living greater than that, and it create...
And he leans in, so carefully. Breathing and not breathing and hearts beating between us and he's so close, he's so close and I can't feel my legs anymore. I can't feel my fingers or the cold or the emptiness of this room because all I feel is him, e...
A life without an objective is much like a ship at sea with no port in mind. It drifts with the waves or storms, or with the whim of the captain. They are tempted to ask, amidst the battles of life, "Is the struggle worth-while?" That attitude lessen...
The trouble is, writing the damn thing is like unscrewing your skull and pouring the contents of your brain into an empty tank. The tank has a shape, more or less - has more or less defined edges, a bottom and sides. But what it mostly has is volume:...
Back home, I went to my closet and pulled out the old engineer’s transit case stored there. When we were kids, Emma and I had found it in the attic, dusty and empty, and the leather strap used to carry it had a small cut in it. The tag on the top o...
