The evening before I departed I stood on the rim of a lagoon on Isla Rabida. Flamingos rode on its dark surface like pink swans, apparently asleep. Small, curved feathers, shed from their breasts, drifted away from them over the water on a light bree...
I set my face toward the sun again, and I think about my old life—the one I feel as though I’ve abandoned somehow. It hurts to think of it that way. And even though I know it wasn’t perfect, I look back now, and all I see is perfection. Every s...
All your life you look to America for those home-grown, corn-fed tits that the Yank bitches all sprout when they’re about fourteen – those bulging DDs that you wank about as a kid as you look longingly across the Atlantic, simultaneously repulsed...
Don’t expect good things to come easily, we must work at them. Easy is to think about improving. Difficult is to put these thoughts into action. Easy is to stumble and fall. Difficult is to get back up. Easy is to judge the mistakes of others. Diff...
History, practical experience, common sense and economic theory all agree: economic competition is probably one of the greatest ideas humans ever came up with. When people compete to achieve the same goal, great things seem to happen that otherwise w...
I don’t want to marry you. I don’t want to want you,” he added fiercely, taking one measured step toward her, then another. “And I sure as hell don’t want to love you. But, God help me, I just can’t stop myself.” Closing the rest of the...
We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so...
I said that I have finished telling my story, not that the story is finished. I said before that no story is ever really finished, each one is part of a longer story and consists of smaller stories, some of which are told, others passed over in silen...
I guess I could be pretty pissed off about what happened to me, but it’s hard to stay mad when there’s so much beauty in the world. Sometimes I feel like I’m seeing it all at once, and it’s too much; my heart fills up like a balloon that’s ...
Dr. Blockhead's mocking face was solemn for once. 'Modern science is wiping out deviant strains of the human form,' he said. 'In the twenty-first century, genetic engineering will do more than merely eliminate Siamese twins and alligator-skinned peop...
I do wonder if the modern world creates these desperations for you. It makes you crave products you don’t want. It places its imperatives in front of religion, faith. It employs certain people for its cause. Celebrities, singers, musicians. When yo...
A primary reason that people believe that life is getting worse is because our information about the problems of the world has steadily improved. If there is a battle today somewhere on the planet, we experience it almost as if we were there. During ...
There was no sense to life, to the structure of things. D.H. Lawrence had known that. You needed love, but not the kind of love most people used and were used up by. Old D.H. had known something. His buddy Huxley was just an intellectual fidget, but ...
So far Kat has been through all the Wa's she could think of, but Hale hadn't admitted to being Walter or Ward or Washington. He'd firmly denied both Warren and Waverly. Watson had prompted him to do a very bad Sherlock Holmes impersonation throughout...
He gave his Son, his one and only Son. And this is why: so that no one need be destroyed; by believing in him, anyone can have a whole and lasting life. God didn't go to all the trouble of sending his Son merely to point an accusing finger, telling t...
The idea of Zen is to catch life as it flows. There is nothing extraordinary or mysterious about Zen. I raise my hand ; I take a book from the other side of the desk ; I hear the boys playing ball outside my window; I see the clouds blown away beyond...
I learned that, while rejection is the name of the game, I’m always going to be exactly what someone is looking for, eventually. Whether it is looks or personality, be it in the professional world or the dating world, what others have over me is ir...
At this point in history, our society tends to elevate and reward the specialist...This concentrated focus has brought some benefits...It may also be a modern malady. Specialization, when taken too far and allowed to define who and what we are, becom...
Was there a person in your life, who touched your heart, like nobody else, ever did, whose letters or gifts are still safe in your secret closet, whose memories still bring the deepest of smiles and whose name still leaves your lips trembling and hea...
Why, I've been all over the world, I tell you, and fairly loafed and lolled in every conceivable sort of ease and luxury, but the Soul of me—the wild, restless, breathless, discontented soul of me—never sat down before in all its life—I say, un...
I remember it so well. Dying. It was the most painful thing I've ever experienced. I couldn't scream because my lungs were torn apart or full of blood. I don't know. I just had to lie there, trying to breathe, hoping to drop dead as quickly as possib...
