Quotes of: Freshman-year Keyword

It's just so sad what we're willing to do for the Joey Spinellis of the world, you know? The mutilating, the tweezing, the enhancing, the plumping, the pinching, the waxing, the starving, the sweating, the bleaching. And for what? So you can wake up ...

The Vinyl Princess

You're thinking that people don't keep up old jealousies for twenty years or so. Perhaps not. Not just primitive, brute jealousy. That means a word and a blow. But the thing that rankles is hurt vanity. That sticks. Humiliation. And we've all got a s...

Whose Body?

People who sell bolts and nuts and locomotives and frozen orange juice make billions, while the people who struggle to bring a little beauty into the world, give life a little meaning, they starve. --"$10,000 A Year, Easy

While Mortals Sleep: Unpublished Short Fiction

The wyvern swooped, but it was not to rend and tear but rather to bank and stare with one curious beady eye at the bodies of the minds that had touched hers in a way that no human had dared to do for hundreds of years. Such a slender and delicate cre...

Witch of the Fall

And every year there is a brief, startling moment When we pause in the middle of a long walk home and Suddenly feel something invisible and weightless Touching our shoulders, sweeping down from the air: It is the autumn wind pressing against our bodi...

Wild Gratitude

Where do you come up with these zingers, Clint? Do you own some kind of joke factory in Indonesia where you've got eight-year-olds working ninety hours a week to deliver you that kind of top-quality witticism? There are boy bands with more original m...

Will Grayson, Will Grayson

A lie is no less a lie because it is a thousand years old. Your undivided church has liked nothing better than persecuting its own members, burning them and hacking them apart when they stood by their own conscience, slashing their bellies open and f...

Wolf Hall

Berners-Lee was supremely lucky in the work environment he had settled into, the Swiss particle physics lab CERN. It took him ten years to nurture his slow hunch about a hypertext information platform.

Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation

I’m willing to die for the woman I love. I just want to take 75 years to do it.

Who Moved My Choose?: An Amazing Way to Deal With Change by Deciding to Let Indecision Into Your Life

I remember a friend many years ago who had taped a sign to his refrigerator: There's a dream dreaming us. If you try to think about what that means it makes your mind silly, but that silliness is good.

Wild Mind: Living the Writer's Life

I got married at a good time, though a better time would have been 20 years from now.

Who Moved My Choose?: An Amazing Way to Deal With Change by Deciding to Let Indecision Into Your Life

I know now, after fifty years, that the finding/losing, forgetting/remembering, leaving/returning, never stops. The whole of life is about another chance, and while we are alive, till the very end, there is always another chance.

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

Squandering time is a luxury of profligate youth, when the years are to us as dollars are to billionaires. Doing the same thing in middle age just makes you nervous, not with vague puritan guilt but the more urgent worry that you're running out of ti...

We Learn Nothing

The Church is composed of people, and people do terrible things and commit sin - it's what the Church has been telling us for two thousand years and continues to tell us, which is why the Church is here and essentially one of the major reasons why pe...

Why Catholics are Right

Visitation Day - I was not even born yet when the world stopped turning, twenty years ago. It is hard for me to imagine that moment, though I have heard the tale many times, for I have never seen the light of the moon or a sunrise

Where the Rock Splits the Sky

We hear about Tiger Woods as a prodigy at three years old. For every Tiger Woods, there are thousands of kids who never want to touch a golf club again.

Warrior Girls: Protecting Our Daughters Against the Injury Epidemic in Women's Sports

Letting go. Everyone talks about it like it's the easiest thing. Unfurl your fingers one by one until your hand is open. But my hand has been clenched into a fist for three years now; it's frozen shut.

Where She Went

In a perfectly designed world —one with no history— we would not have to suffer everything from hemorrhoids to cancer.

Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body

Why is an actor's unintentional giggling called a 'corpse'? It seems to me quite the opposite. It proves that he's very much alive, and can still tell how silly this all is: him dressed up as someone else speaking words written by a third party.

Year of the King: An Actor's Diary and Sketchbook

Researchers measure that the average major-league pitcher puts 40 pounds of pressure on his shoulder by cocking and releasing the baseball. Curious how much more the body could take, those same researchers tested cadavers. The shoulder broke apart at...

The Yankee Years

I had to ride my bike to and from their god damn plant way up north in the high-chemical crime district, and reachable only by riding on the shoulder of some major freeways. I could feel the years ticking off my life expectancy as the mile markers st...

Zodiac