An "attack on SeaWorld" might mean a bomb, or it might mean graffiti and glitter and a cream pie in the face. The government doesn't always seem to distinguish between the two.
Language does this to our memories— simplifies, solidifies, codifies, mummifies. An oft -told story is like a photograph in a family album; eventually, it replaces the moment it was meant to capture.
So many problems, however infinitely varied they first appear, turn out to be matters of money. I can't tell you how much this offends me.
I am the daughter of a psychologist. I know that the thing ostensibly being studied is rarely the thing being studied. (We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, p. 99)
How did I make a living? I haven't. I have eked out an existence." - Ella Baker
His breath hitched, and he regarded me hungrily. “You’re playing with fire, you know that?” “That’s weird, considering you’re an ice prin—” I didn’t get any further, as Ash leaned in and kissed me.
Tis action moves the world....[in] the game of chess, mind that: ye cannot leave your men to stand unmoving on the board and hope to win. A soldier must first step upon the battlefield if does mean to cross it.
I still don't know where you came from," he says. "Some days it's like you just fell from the sky." "Some days I feel like I did." I say.
Say, ‘Thank you, Phin.’ ” “Oh, please.” “Say, Thank youvery much, Phin. ” “I don’t think so.” “Say, ‘You are a great lover, Phin.’ ” “I’m out of here.
We are like water, aren’t we? We can be fluid, flexible when we have to be. But strong and destructive, too.” And something else, I think to myself. Like water, we mostly follow the path of least resistance.
The new architecture and urban design of segregation could be called Calvinist: they reflect a desire to live in a world of predestination rather than chance, to strip the world of its wide-open possibilities and replace them with freedom of choice i...
...the gym is a kind of wildlife preserve for bodily exertion. A preserve protects species whose habitat is vanishing elsewhere, and the gym (and home gym) accommodates the survival of bodies after the abandonment of the original sites of bodily exer...
You don't have to stop thinking and asking questions to believe in God, child. If He'd wanted a flock of eight billion sheep, He wouldn't have given us opposable thumbs, much less free will.
For some stories, it's easy. The moral of 'The Three Bears,' for instance, is "Never break into someone else's house.' The moral of 'Snow White' is 'Never eat apples.' The moral of World War I is 'Never assassinate Archduke Ferdinand.
She took Sunny's coat off, and then her own, and dropped them both on the floor. Normally, of course, one should hang up one's coat on a hook or in a closet, but itchy hives are very irritating and tend to make one abandon such matters.
[In mountaineering, if] we look for private experience rather than public history, even getting to the top becomes an optional narrative rather than the main point, and those who only wander in high places become part of the story.
A lone peak of high point is a natural focal point in the landscape, something by which both travelers and local orient themselves. In the continuum of landscape, mountains are discontinuity -- culminating in high points, natural barriers, unearthly ...
...the subject of walking is, in some sense, about how we invest universal acts with particular meanings. Like eating or breathing, it can be invested with wildly different cultural meanings, from the erotic to the spiritual, from the revolutionary t...
Of course he freaked me out. Of course it's nothing to do with me. But none of that matters. He loved me and now he doesn't. I was everything to him and now I am nothing.
And then, with the feather-green darkness pressed against the windows, he puts his filthy fingers on my scrubbed hope face and says, "If I kiss you, it's all over." And then he does. And then it is.
Accepting the presidency, Barack introduces "my best friend of sixteen years, the love of my life, Michelle Obama" and I think I will pass out. That, right there, is love in action.
