And then . . . we’re going to get in my car.” I waited for him to elaborate on a destination. “And?” He gently kissed the nape of my neck. “What do you think?” I couldn’t help a small gasp of delight. “Oh, wow.” “I know, right?...
My unlucky star had destined me to be born when there was much talk about morality and, at the same time, more murders than in any other period. There is, undoubtedly, some connection between these phenomena. I sometime ask myself whether the connect...
I've done this sort of thing before. Not prophecies so much, but you'd be surprised how many people want to realign their ancestral lines to seem nobler, or rewrite their family history to remove more morally questionable episodes." He paused to reca...
I have been thinking about existence lately. In fact, I have been so full of admiration for existence that I have hardly been able to enjoy it properly . . . I feel sometimes as if I were a child who opens its eyes on the world once and sees amazing ...
And one cried wee, wee, wee, all the way—" Jessica breaking down in a giggle as he reaches for the spot along her sweatered flank he knows she can't bear to be tickled in. She hunches, squirming, out of the way as he rolls past, bouncing off the ba...
What gets me most about these people, Daddy, isn't how ignorant they are, or how much they drink. It's the way they have of thinking that everything nice in the world is a gift to the poor people from them or their ancestors. The first afternoon I wa...
For that entire journey across the rough terrain of Afghanistan, I never stopped praying that everything of the world could be peaceful, that all lives might return to normal. I believe that wish is universal for every woman who is a mother. For all ...
Along with the standard computer warranty agreement which said that if the machine 1) didn't work, 2) didn't do what the expensive advertisements said, 3) electrocuted the immediate neighborhood, 4) and in fact failed entirely to be inside the expens...
It had seemed entirely sensible at the time. A simple way to test the truth of her claim that she had lain with de Villiers. To show her that lying to him was useless. To make a point. Instead, he had ignited a desire that burned him like none he had...
I rolled my eyes. “I feel like a zoo animal.” Travis watched me for a moment, noted those staring, and then stood up. “I CAN’T!” he yelled. I stared in awe as the entire room jerked their heads in his direction. Travis bobbed his head a cou...
My main concern while in New York wasn't becoming a hot shot. I was more concerned with staying alive, and that took all the pleasure out of the experience. I didn't know where to find a grocery store so I subsisted on hot dogs, peanuts and whatever ...
A crucial point here is that understanding is not only a matter of reflection, using finitary propositions, on some preexistent, already determinate experience. Rather, understanding is the way we "have a world," the way we experience our world as a ...
She wasn’t afraid of difficulties; what frightened her was being forced to choose one particular path. Choosing a path meant having to miss out on others. She had a whole life to live and she was always thinking that, in future, she might regret th...
Nevertheless, in a passage that is very often commented upon because it summarizes the entire salvific economy of faith, the Apostle calls Christ the 'pioneer and perfecter of our faith' (Heb. 12:2), because he has to accomplish the same act as the C...
When she emerged, Keith was watching the tiny round window of the under-the-counter washing machine. "Put your clothes in for a wash," he said. "They were disgusting." Ginny always thought that the only way of getting clothes clean was by drowning th...
Pong had mutated into large stand-up Sega consoles by '82 and here was some extra revenue the guys were well up for. So the space on the left of the entrance was to be the games room. Until two weeks to opening. "Where's the cloakroom?" "The what?" "...
The point is that television does not reveal who the best man is. In fact, television makes impossible the determination of who is better than whom, if we mean by 'better' such things as more capable in negotiation, more imaginative in executive skil...
Oh God how subtle he would have to be, how cunning... No paragraph, no phrase even of the thousands the book must contain could strike a discordant note, be less than fully imagined, an entire novel's worth of thought would have to be expended on eac...
These days every morning begins like a joke you think you have heard before, but there is no one telling it whom you can stop. One day it's about a cow who walks into a bar, then about a man with a big nose on his honeymoon, then about a kangaroo who...
If you were offered the chance to live your own life again, would you seize the opportunity? The only real philosophical answer is automatically self-contradictory: 'Only if I did not know that I was doing so.' To go through the entire experience onc...
Swinging the door open, I took a sip. All of the coffee in the world wouldn't help if more visitors showed up at my door this early in the morning but the caffeine fortification was a bonus. The delivery guy pushed his clipboard at me. I held up my c...