Here was something I already knew to be true about myself: Just as there are some wives who will occasionally need a break from their husbands in order to visit a spa for the weekend with their girlfriends, I will always be the sort of wife who occas...
I can no longer cry. I groan a few times. Through the slits that are my eyes, I stare at my shoes, at the gray swirls of the concrete floor, at the bright orange lid of my syringe. And I realize—it’s a kind of horror—that this is my life. And I...
Most argument, and in fact most conflict, has nothing to do with the present. It's always about the past or the future. People can't agree on the details of what has happened or is going to happen. But we rarely know what has happened, and we never k...
Oh, where is it, where did my past go, when I was young, happy and intelligent, when my dreams and thoughts had some grace, and the present and future were lit up with hope? Why is it, that when we've just started to live, we grow dull, gray, uninter...
I think a person has to believe in something, or search out some kind of faith; otherwise life is empty, nothing. How can you live not knowing why the cranes fly, why children are born, why there are stars in the sky... Either you know why you live, ...
It gave her a sudden sense that it was now her turn to grow old, to find the world changing, sliding away from the old ways of being and behaving, so that you were gradually a stranger to the place you lived in. The woman priest with jogging clothes ...
No, Roger had not seen the funny side. But there had been a moment when, after looking at his watch, he had thought: I can remember when Christmas morning would start at about half past ten with a glass of Buck's Fizz in bed. Now it begins at half pa...
Don't you have a religion?" Dorolow asked Horza. "Yes," he replied, not taking his eyes away from the screen on the wall above the end of the main mess-room table. "My survival." "So... your religion dies with you. How sad," Dorolow said, looking bac...
And now here was Arabella, making him feel worse. Maybe that was what she always did; maybe she always made him feel worse, and he'd never really noticed before. Maybe what seemed like the ordinary rough-and-tumble of marriage, combined with hard wor...
Just before the went back into warp and its crew sat down at the table, the ship expelled the limp corpse of Zallin. Where it had found a live man in a suit, it left a dead youth in shorts and a tattered shirt, tumbling and freezing while a thin shel...
Right." Doctor Cherryman's face lit up. Here was a way for him to grapple with the problem that the reality of vampires had presented to him. "Let's say vampires exist. What does that mean?" "That they're bloodsucking murderers here to kill us all?" ...
Three things Marco taught me today race through my mind: boys will lie to your face just to have sex with you, don’t trust any boy who says I love you, and never date a boy who lives on the south side of Fairfield.
Alex and Carlos—the tag team from hell. They’re the last people I need shit from right now. If they decide to trail me, too, I’ll have an entire entourage. “I’m fine.” “Then sit up and talk to us.” “Okay, in that case I’m not fine...
...what books meant, the possibility they presented: you could protect them forever, store them up like engineers store water, endless resources of time and knowledge snared in ink, tied down to paper, layered on shelves...Moments made physical, unto...
We have held the peculiar notion that a person or society that is a little different from us, whoever we are, is somehow strange or bizarre, to be distrusted or loathed. Think of the negative connotations of words like alien or outlandish. And yet th...
The recognition of his carelessness filled Mr. Lecky with fear and anger. In the dusk his eerie heart could anticipate the hours of terror which he had laid up for himself. Sounds, real or imaginary, the silences and secrets of the night, the working...
The problems of today's youth were no longer a Sunday supplement, or a news broadcast, or anything so remote and intangible. They were suddenly become a dirty, shivering boy, who told us that in this world we had built for him with our sweat and our ...
Not to forgive is to be imprisoned by the past, by old grievances that do not permit life to proceed with new business. Not to forgive is to yield oneself to another's control... to be locked into a sequence of act and response, of outrage and reveng...
We were born to be friends. We both knew it. The Australian Aborigines have the traditional belief that a complete human being comprises two parts that are split before birth, that we spend our lives seeking the other part to make ourselves whole aga...
He leaned toward me. Suddenly the space between us shrank. "I will do everything in my power to ensure your survival, and should the need arise, I will put myself between danger and you." His voice was quiet and intimate. "Do not hesitate to use me a...
A people believe in a god' - she completes the circle -' and the god tells them what to believe. It's a cycle, like water flowing into the ocean, then up to the skies, and into rain, which falls and flows into the ocean. But it is different in that i...
