For even now the drums were in our blood, we sat forward almost hearing them across the bay, and the van raced on through the streets so that the driver could hustle back for another load of pleasure-seekers, so bent on pleasure they were driving rig...
The fact is, the man who’d begotten me didn’t want me. In his eyes I should never have been born. And perhaps that would’ve been best. As it was, my existence had proven to be nothing more than a nuisance for everyone. I angered my father, brou...
Nothing will go wrong,Micheal said soothingly. Me and you? We've been through to much together. And your too unpleasant to die.Too bossy.God will keep you down here for a while until you learn your lesson and start learning to work and play well with...
There's a girl calm people don't know about. It's a girl teen standstill. A motionless peace. It doesn't come from anywhere but inside us, and it only lasts for a few years. It's born from being a not woman yet. It's free flowing and invisible. It's ...
A phenomenon that a number of people have noted while in deep depression is the sense of being accompanied by a second self — a wraithlike observer who, not sharing the dementia of his double, is able to watch with dispassionate curiosity as his co...
In the country, I stopped being a person who, in the words of Sylvia Boorstein, . I grew calmer, but beneath that calm was a deep well of loneliness I hadn't known was there. ... Anxiety was my fuel. When I stopped, it was all waiting for me: fear, a...
I am not depressed; my life is just shit. As a consequence of my not being depressed, I am not like them. You need to know this from the very off. You need to know I, Arch Fry, will not allow myself to be neatly pigeonholed, erroneously labelled or c...
The one thing a writer has to have is a pencil and some paper. That's enough, so long as she knows that she and she alone is in charge of that pencil, and responsible, she and she alone, for what it writes on that paper. In other words, that she's fr...
Music expresses feeling, that is to say, gives shape and habitation to feeling, not in space but in time. To the extent that music has a history that is more than a history of its formal evolution, our feelings must have a history too. Perhaps certai...
When you are secure in yourself, know what turns you on, and enjoy watching your partner watch you experience sexual pleasure, you have a highly novel relationship grounded in love. The experience of seeing and being seen fuels lust and desire. This ...
Reading is merely a surrogate for thinking for yourself; it means letting someone else direct your thoughts. Many books, moreover, serve merely to show how many ways there are of being wrong, and how far astray you yourself would go if you followed t...
It occurred to Raule that all children were monsters in the world and were instinctively aware of it. They were reminded of their anomalous nature by adults, whom they failed to resemble, and with whose habitations and tools their bodies were at odds...
There was one sure way to avoid being assigned an impromptu chore in our house - be it taking out the trash or cleaning your room - and that was to have your face buried in a book. Like churches during the Middle Ages, books conferred instant sanctua...
F. Scott Fitzgerald believed inserting exclamation points was the literary equivalent of an author laughing at his own jokes, but that's not the case in the modern age; now, the exclamation point signifies creative confusion. All it illustrates is th...
Part of this experience involves your being able to say to a person who is dying, "You are loved. You are beautiful. You are like a newborn babe, going into another realm. Release now anyone, and everything, that is a burden to you. Release everythin...
I filled the song with everything I wished I could teach him about life. I tried to reassure him with every line about how the world is hard and unfair sometimes, but that it's all OK beacuse he is so loved. He is surrounded by souls who would do any...
Simon blinked himself awake, confused, for a moment, why he was in a dungeon that smelled of dung rather than his Brooklyn bedroom - then, once he got his bearings, confused all over again about why he was being awoken in the middle of the night by a...
Ultimately, musicians of the world must come realise the potential of their calling. Like the shamans, we may serve as healers, metaphysicians, inciters, exciters, spiritual guides and sources of inspiration. If the musician is illuminated from withi...
The self-esteem of western women is founded on physical being (body mass index, youth, beauty). This creates a tricky emphasis on image, but the internalized locus of self-worth saves lives. Western men are very different. In externalizing the source...
Thou hast gone on in all thy life hitherto, ever since thou wast born, in a continual opposition to God Himself, unto the infinite Lord, the eternal first being of all the world; thy life hath been nothing but enmity to this God: thou hast as directl...
Over the course of your life you are actually hundreds of different people. You are a different person at the coffee shop than you are at the bar, and a different person for the dry cleaner than you are for your boyfriend, and a different person at w...
