Once, [Rabbi Chanoch] Teller was traveling with 16 of his [18] offspring ... while changing planes in Frankfurt, Teller noticed a German woman gaping. 'Are all of these your children?' the woman asked. 'From one wife?' 'Yes, God has blessed me with a...
Everything that falls upon the eye is an apparition, a sheet dropped over the world's true workings. The nerves & brain are tricked, and one is left with dreams that these specters loose their hands from ours and walk away...so familiar as to imply t...
Even now I ask myself, what would have happened if I had gone to the cove with Tansy that Thursday afternoon, instead of going to the beach? If I had stayed away from the boat at the jetty, hidden from sight? If I had thrown the pearl back in the sea...
It is growing cold. Winter is putting footsteps in the meadow. What whiteness boasts that sun that comes into this wood! One would say milk-colored maidens are dancing on the petals of orchids. How coldly burns our sun! One would say its rays of ligh...
Extinguish my eyes, I'll go on seeing you. Seal my ears, I'll go on hearing you. And without feet I can make my way to you, without a mouth I can swear your name. Break off my arms, I'll take hold of you with my heart as with a hand. Stop my heart, a...
Then Leo realized something was blocking the middle of his view. Something large and fuzzy, and so close, Leo had to cross his eyes to see it properly. It was a large, ugly face. "Holy mother!" he yelped. The face backed away and came into focus. Sta...
I think about going to the lake, but I'm so weak that I barely make it to my meeting place with Gale. I sit on the rock where Cressida filmed us, but it's too wide without his body beside me. Several times I close my eyes and count to ten, thinking t...
See, I know how they do. White folks like to stay in those books. They carry and they keep and they dig in their books, like nothing matters that don’t get written in some book somewhere. Like that’s the only way they can know for sure what happe...
Everything's gonna be fine. Stay optimistic. If there's dark clouds coming, they'll leave again. They always do. The world is round. Everything is round. The biggest invention of all time, the wheel, is round. Things pass, nothing will stay the same ...
My gift to you, Yukiko-chan.' He nodded. 'Use it to cut away your fear, and leave nothing in its wake. Cherish it. And cherish this truth I speak to you now, if no other before or after: The greatest tempest Shima has even known waits in the wings fo...
Joseph, you’re out of clean towels.” Lucia poked her head into the living room, the rest of her hidden behind the wall. Her red hair dripped water onto my wooden floors. “She’s in the buff.” Jenna guffawed. Gabriella rolled her eyes, beamin...
As I was fixing in the bathroom, I thought about how I used to tell my ex Anne that there was “no reality.” Light merely entered the eye and was translated into electrical signals which were translated into chemical signals translated into gestal...
Faith, is the road that goes straight past the gravel, and cloud-mesh dirt into a mirage, where still you believe to go straight, and when you finally catch up with it, it ends at a lake where you stretch your eyes across, but unable to glimpse the o...
Let the months and years come, they can take nothing from me, they can take nothing more. I am so alone, and so without hope that I can confront them without fear. The life that has borne me through these years is still in my hands and my eyes. Wheth...
Despite the variety and the differences, and however much we proclaim the contrary, what the media produce is neither spontaneous nor completely “free:” “news” does not just happen, pictures and ideas do not merely spring from reality into ou...
We doubt in others, what is in fact in ourselves. The skeletons in your own closet are the things that scare you the most about others; people who come from a background of lying are suspicious of lying in others and so on and so forth. The most trus...
You've got this life and while you've got it, you'd better kiss like you only have one moment, try to hold someone's hand like you will never get another chance to, look into people's eyes like they're the last you'll ever see, watch someone sleeping...
In every single scenario that you step into, in life, it is like stepping into a body of water and you need to stop and really stand there to feel what's going on in that water— the temperature, the direction of the current, the particles in the wa...
When the subject is sacred, proud and clever men may come to think that the outsiders who don't know it are not merely inferior to them in skill but lower in God's eyes; as the priests said, 'All that rabble who are not experts in the Torah are accur...
I knew that people said love should be unconditional, given like a dog gives to its master, but what Being could give that way? What could love though it had been kicked and beaten? What could go kissing the hand of its tormentor with upturned eyes? ...
I found that I could not contemplate an adult life in which books were not dominant. I wanted to live and work with them...I had to be able to take books from their places, run my finger over their backs, see how they opened, flick their corners stra...
