We must tell stories the way God does, stories in which a sister must float her little brother on a river with nothing but a basket between him and the crocodiles. Stories in which a king is a coward, and a shepherd boy steps forward to face the gian...
...Bhutan all but bases its identity upon its loneliness, and its refusal to b assimilated into India, or Tibet, or Nepal. Vietnam, at present, is a pretty girl with her face pressed up against the window of the dance hall, waiting to be invited in; ...
In the end nothing matters but the work. You can’t control how it’s taken, and the act of telling a story always involves a gap. Sometimes confusion is the risk of ambiguity–I say that to students all the time. It’s true at the fireside and i...
We spent all of our days afraid it was too good to be true, Tatiana," said Alexander. "We were always afraid all we had was a borrowed five minutes from now." Her hands went on his face. "That's all any of us ever has, my love," she said. "And it all...
I sung to her at night. Every night. The same song. And she would do this thing, when she would close her eyes. And it felt like she was connecting with the music. That she was depicting every note, every sound, every word. I would watch her, watch h...
You're seriously going to worry about what people think right now?" "No, I'm worrying about people taking pictures and putting them on Facebook. That crap never dies. Kind of like you, Mikey." Michael, straight-faced, said, "He's got a point, because...
How can I judge?" she said at last. "To me, he is a hero. To the world a monster." She let her head fall into her arms and started crying quietly. "I miss him! Curse him! I miss him!" Mithorden put a hand on her shoulder and let her cry for a few min...
If there is no point in the universe that we discover by the methods of science, there is a point that we can give the universe by the way we live, by loving each other, by discovering things about nature, by creating works of art. And that—in a wa...
But something-luck, fate, conspiracy, whatever you want to call it-has thrown us together." He leaned forward, his gaze never leaving her face. "Of all the crazy places in the world, here we are, at the same table, in the same dirty Vietnamese cafe. ...
There were a few middle-aged and even elderly women in the train, their silver-wiry hair and wrinkled faces, scourged by time and trouble, having almost a grotesque, certainly a pathetic, appearance in such a jaunty situation. In a true view, perhaps...
Throughout human history, as our species has faced the frightening, terrorizing fact that we do not know who we are, or where we are going in this ocean of chaos, it has been the authorities, the political, the religious, the educational authorities ...
The denier that ID [intelligent design] is science faces the following dilemma. Either he admits that the intervention of such a designer is possible, or he does not. If he does not, he must explain why that belief is more scientific than the belief ...
Now that I have smelled you, I can face you down. Even though my body is shaking, I can keep a place free from you. I can feel you running round in my head, you see, but all the doors are closed to you now. I can control the dark inside, which is whe...
And finally the glass that contains and spills this stuff continually while the drinker hunches before it, while the bartender gathers up empties, gives back the drinker's own face. Who knows what it looks like; who cares whether or not it was young ...
The dying bees, the Antarctic melt, the mountains of old tires, the incessant toxic belch of factories that make Batman bobbleheads for Happy Meals. Off-gassing couches! Cancerous tinned tomatoes! Imprisoned killer whales! Our breastmilk is poisoned....
I wish kids at school would quit calling me a porno dork-face, though. There wasn't any sex involved! I got knocked out, I panicked and called the cops. Okay, somewhere along the line everybody's clothes fell off, but that's not exactly a federal cri...
Before yoga, my life was filled with regret about choices I'd made in the past, and fears about choices I'd make in the future. Yoga teaches us how to be present in the present. Once you learn how to live in the now, you realize that the past is a me...
It came to me on a winter day. Life so full and rich will fade. Though I wish it were not so, One cannot run from an expected fate. And as a steady gust of wind fell upon my face, It was then when I felt a chill and thus did then know; Though I wish ...
Our identities are forged in the fires of trial. What we become after those fires always burn’s forever into the future we create. Our lives are meant to merge into a destiny of the consciousness of the world. Move forward with a purpose and sight ...
Alex took a silent step closer to the kitchen door and watched unseen as willow spooned instant coffee into a pair of mugs.With another yawn, she scraped her hair off her face and stretched. She looked so entirely human, so drowsy and sleep-rumpled.F...
Modern nationalism swept Europe alongside the flourishing of industrialisation. Across the continent, poets and intellectuals cultivated and often heavily modified vernacular languages to be bearers of 19th century modernity. These guardians of langu...
