As he paid the hansom and followed his wife's long train into the house he took refuge in the comforting platitude that the first six months were always the most difficult in marriage. 'After that I suppose we shall have pretty nearly finished rubbin...
Something about telling that story made my gut grow back together." What?" Oh, nothing. Just thinking out loud." That's who you really like. The people you can think out loud in front of." The people who've been in your secret hiding places." The peo...
And in that space, Colin thought, there was room enough to reinvent himself--room enough to make himself into something other than a prodigy, to remake his story better and different--room enough to reborn again and again and again.If Colin learned o...
Virtue is what happens when someone has made a thousand small choices requiring effort and concentration to do something which is good and right, but which doesn't come naturally. And then, on the thousand and first time, when it really matters, they...
The affair seems absurdly trifling, and yet I dare call nothing trivial when I reflect that some of my most classic cases have had the least promising commencement. You will remember, Watson, how the dreadful business of the Abernetty family was firs...
But of course it makes sense because we are Third Worlders and Third Worlders are forward-looking, we like things to be new, because our best is still ahead, while in the West their best is already past and so they have to make a fetish of that past....
Goya’s savage verve, his harsh, brutal genius, captivated Des Esseintes. On the other hand, the universal admiration his works had won rather put him off, and for years he had refrained from framing them, for fear that if he hung them up, the first...
It is often thought that spirits in the after-world do not breathe as we might do - and that in being dead, one does not require inhaling and exhaling anything. Well, they do exchange ethers, and the body of a soul does in fact breathe, and talk and ...
He seems, in manner and rank, above the class of young men who take that turn; but I remember hearing them say, that the little theatre at Fairport was to open with the performance of a young gentleman, being his first appearance on any stage.—If t...
That many good men have believed this strange fable [Christianity], and lived very good lives under that belief (for credulity is not a crime) is what I have no doubt of. In the first place, . There are also many who have been so enthusiastically enr...
Have you ever looked for the root of production? Take a look at an electric generator and dare tell yourself that it was created by the muscular effort of unthinking brutes. Try to grow a seed of wheat without the knowledge left to you by men who had...
Shriveled apple cores stood side by side on the window sill, a long row of them with their seed chambers bitten open and the pointed sees scattered on the floor. The brown, discolored remnants of their flesh bore the imprint of his grandfather's teet...
I have always had a special affinity for libraries and librarians, for the most obvious reasons. I love books. (One of my first Jobs was shelving books at a branch of the Chicago Public Library.) Libraries are a pillar of any society. I believe our l...
Early in our marriage, we knew that once the kids were gone, we would still be married and have to work on it. So, we decided to pay it forward. We worked in the first year like we wanted things to be in the fiftieth year. I'm so glad we did.
That night I dreamt of the moment I found my mother’s body. My life was a series of befores and afters: before my mother’s death and after my mother’s death. Before I left the Monster and after I left the Monster. The first thing I remembered a...
We are not told, or not told early enough so that it sinks in, that mathematics is a language, and that we can learn it like any other, including our own. We have to learn our own language twice, first when we learn to speak it, second when we learn ...
Ingrid's skin was the smoothest texture, so pale that it was transparent. I could see the blue veins that ran down her arms, and they made her seem fragile somehow. the way Eric Daniels, my first boyfriend, seemed fragile when I laid my head on his c...
Failure is always louder than success. But there is an accumulation of all the things you don’t do wrong, and that becomes your confidence. You can even get to the point where that confidence lasts longer than the dance. Seconds at first. Then minu...
Hawksmoor had often noticed how, in the moments when he first carne upon a corpse, all the objects around it wavered for an instant and became unreal- the trees which rose above a body hidden in woodland, the movement of the river which had washed a ...
I never had what it takes to make a first-rate anything.' 'That's wrong,' she declared. 'Everyone must have one thing that they can excel at. It's just a matter of drawing it out, isn't it?' But school doesn't know how to draw it out. It crushes the ...
Fucking Hallmark never wrote anything for how I felt then. When Metallica and the rest of the metal community pitched in to pay for Acrassicauda, the Iraqi heavy metal band, to move to the US is the only thing that comes close. And maybe the late-bre...
