We seldom consider how much of our lives we must render in return for some object we barely want, seldom need, buy only because it was put before us...And this is understandable given the workings of our system where without a job we perish, where if...
Someday, the people we know, are acquainted to become the people we knew. They leave. They leave to pursue the opportunities laid down in their paths and they leave on account of misunderstandings. Their absence causes a vacuum, a space, an incomplet...
There is a time sometime, and a place where in the perfect stillness of the evening within the sunset serenity we unite in the glow... Blissful paradise divinity, brilliancy glassy deepness, shallowness slow and smooth... We forever are eternal whole...
In water so fine, a few minutes of bad memory all but disappear downstream, washed away by ten thousand belly busters, a million cannonballs. Paradise was never heaven-high when I was a boy but waist-deep, an oasis of cutoff blue jeans and raggedy Co...
Love is an afternoon of fishing when I'd sooner be at the ballet. Love is eating burnt toast and lumpy graving with a big smile. Love is hearing the words, as I fail to squeeze into my fat jeans. Love is refusing to bring up the past, even if doing s...
Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Almost everything--all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure--these things just fall away in...
The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them -- words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out. But i...
Julia Kline, you’ve spent your whole life running and all you’ve done is run farther away from the love that’s been waiting for you all along. The first time you smiled at me with your two missing teeth you had my undivided attention. When you ...
BUT MOST PEOPLE ARE RATHER STUPID AND WASTE THEIR LIVES. HAVE YOU NOT SEEN THAT? HAVE YOU NOT LOOKED DOWN FROM THE HORSE AT A CITY AND THOUGHT HOW MUCH IT RESEMBLED AN ANT HEAP, FULL OF BLIND CREATURES WHO THINK THEIR MUNDANE LITTLE WORLD WAS REAL? Y...
We all wear masks to veil the truth. Truth is nakedness. Truth is fear. Truth is the gardener making you sit on his lap asking you to light his cigarette. Truth is father— with a limp cigarette on his lips —telling you to never use his matches to...
There is the staircase, there is the sun. There is the kitchen, the plate with toast and strawberry jam, your subterfuge, your ordinary mirage. You stand red-handed. You want to wash yourself in earth, in rocks and grass What are you supposed to do w...
I was astonished to see Adrian watching me, a look of contentment on his face. His eyes seemed to study my every feature. Seeing me notice him, he immediately looked away. His usual smirky expression replaced by a dreamy one. “The mechanic will wai...
It's an unfortunate word, 'depression', because the illness has nothing to do with feeling sad, sadness is on the human palette. Depression is a whole other beast. It's when your old personality has left town and been replaced by a block of cement wi...
I should have written you a letter, it was too late to make the deaths of my brothers an excuse. Since they died, I wrote a book; why not a letter? A mysterious but truthful answer is that while I can gear myself up to do a novel, letters, real-life ...
I lost Susy thirteen years ago; I lost her mother--her incomparable mother!--five and a half years ago; Clara has gone away to live in Europe and now I have lost Jean. How poor I am, who was once so rich! . . . Jean lies yonder, I sit here; we are st...
There are a hundred things she has tried to chase away the things she won't remember and that she can't even let herself think about because that's when the birds scream and the worms crawl and somewhere in her mind it's always raining a slow and end...
All knowledge that takes special training to acquire is the province of the Magician energy. Whether you are an apprentice training to become a master electrician and unraveling the mysteries of high voltage; or a medical student, grinding away night...
Hey, Alec," he said. The man was on his hands and knees, leaning his face into the middle of a bush; he grunted something that kind of sounded like a "Yeah?" "Why are we spending so much time on this side of where we left them?" Alec pulled himself o...
Jean-Jacques Rousseau defined civilization as when people build fences. A very perceptive observation. And it’s true—all civilization is the product of a fenced-in lack of freedom. The Australian Aborigines are the exception, though. They managed...
If you are a warrior, decency means that you are not cheating anybody at all. You are not even about to cheat anybody. There is a sense of straightforwardness and simplicity. With setting-sun vision, or vision based on cowardice, straightforwardness ...
I grip Colin harder, kissing him longer, unwilling to let him go. This is what I want; this is what I’ve wanted since his damn phone interrupted us this morning, his mouth, his body claiming mine. I’m on fire, every muscle in my body attuned to h...
