Time isn't an orderly stream. Time isn't a placid lake recording each of our ripples. Time is viscous. Time is a massive flow. It is a self-healing substance, which is to say, almost everything will be lost. We're too slight, to inconsequntial, despi...
There is no stillness, only change. Yesterday’s here is not today’s here. Yesterday’s here is somewhere in Russia, in a wilderness in Canada, a deep blue nowhere out in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. It’s behind the sun, it’s in deep spa...
After midday, the rain eased, and the Land Rover rode into Pokhara on a shaft of storm light. Next day there was humid sun and shifting southern skies, but to the north a deep tumult of swirling grays was all that could be seen of the Himalaya. At du...
Outside the window, there slides past that unimaginable and deserted vastness where night is coming on, the sun declining in ghastly blood-streaked splendour like a public execution across, it would seem, half a continent, where live only bears and s...
I step outside, easy at first... there is noise; I don't hear it. There are people; I don't see them... I see the water; I am alongside it. There is a big hill; I conquer it. A mile of grass; I fly across it. With each step I am stronger, and then fa...
When the black thing was at its worst, when the illicit cocktails and the ten-mile runs stopped working, I would feel numb as if dead to the world. I moved unconsciously, with heavy limbs, like a zombie from a horror film. I felt a pain so fierce and...
Aaron reached into his jacket pocket and took out his Bible, a gift from his father, Captain Benjamin K. Matthews, on the the day he had ridden off to war. Aaron opened to the Psalms, intending to read, but his eyes were heavy and closed against his ...
The name Alaska is probably an abbreviation of Unalaska, derived from the original Aleut word agunalaksh, which means "the shores where the sea breaks its back." The war between water and land is never-ending. Waves shatter themselves in spent fury a...
I know a man who drives 600 yards to work. I know a woman who gets in her car to go a quarter of a mile to a college gymnasium to walk on a treadmill, then complains passionately about the difficulty of finding a parking space. When I asked her once ...
It's a funny thing about Americans, we love to bitch about paying too much for the things we really need and are really a bargain, like gas and postage stamps, but we willingly shell out outrageous amounts for unnecessary crap like gourmet coffee and...
Okay, so English settlers brought rabbits with them to Australia to breed for food and stuff, right? But they escaped and basically started destroying the country, eating the vegetation, that kind of thing. So by the early 1900s, the government was t...
Only a clever human can make a real Joke about virtue, or indeed about anything else; any of them can be trained to talk as if virtue were funny. Among flippant people the joke is always assumed to have been made. No one actually makes it; but every ...
I love the quietude of misty dawn before the sober sun is up... The morning songs of birds awakening in blooming garden sets my soul gently... Aroma flowers with glistering of the dew... Deep full chest breath... Shy sunbeams flickering over the tops...
You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhi...
John Coffey: You know, I fell asleep this afternoon and had me a dream. I dreamed about Del's mouse. Paul Edgecomb: Did you, John? John Coffey: I dreamed he got down to that place Boss Howell talked about, that Mouseville place. I dreamed there was k...
Mr. Eddy: [to a tailgater after running him off the road] Don't tailgate! Don't you fucking ever tailgate! Do you know how much space is needed to stop a car traveling at 35 miles per hour? Six car lengths! Six fuckin' car lengths! That's a hundred a...
[Frawley is describing to Claire how he knows where the bank robbers who kidnapped her probably came from] FBI S.A. Adam Frawley: With guys like this - hardcore guys - 90% of them eminate from a one square mile neighborhood called Charlestown. Famili...
And I loved you I loved you so There were times I forgot to breathe Waiting for the phone call For the sound of your voice Touching me places You couldn't touch For the miles between us. And I loved you Like a forest loves the spring Waiting for the ...
This is what we, in the con business, call making a spectacle of ourselves. Let’s try to avoid that from now on.” “Except […] Mr. No-Sex-in-the-Bathrooms is going to describe two probably drunk people who staggered in. Plus, he thinks I’m a...
Metaphor isn't just decorative language. If it were, it wouldn't scare us so much. . . . Colorful language threatens some people, who associate it, I think, with a kind of eroticism (playing with language in public = playing with yourself), and with ...
Sometimes you want to say, “I love you, but…” Yet the “but” takes away the ‘I love you’. In love their are no ‘buts’ or ‘if’s’ or ‘when’. It’s just there, and always. No beginning, no end. It’s the condition-less state...
