He could understand that the creatures, the fish and the owls, should feed and frolic at moon-rise, at moon-down and at south-moon-over, for these were all plain marks to go by, direct and visible. He marvelled, padding on bare feet past the slat-fen...
Or perhaps is is that time doesn't heal wounds at all, perhaps that is the biggest lie of them all, and instead what happens is that each wound penetrates the body deeper and deeper until one day you find that the sheer geography of your bones - the ...
For myself I can say that, having had every good thing that money can buy, an experience like another, I could part without a pang with every possession I have. We live in uncertain times and our all may yet be taken from us. With enough plain food t...
Have you suffered, starved and triumphed, grovelled down, yet grasped at glory, Grown bigger in the bigness of the whole? 'Done things' just for the doing, letting babblers tell the story, Seeing through the nice veneer the naked soul? Have you seen ...
Si algún día tiene usted una hija, bendición que no se la deseo yo a nadie, porque es ley de vida que tarde o temprano le romperá a uno el corazón, en fin, a lo que iba, que si algún día tiene usted una hija empezará sin darse cuenta a dividi...
You need my help? What for? Bread, cash, a fake identity to help you slip sideways through the cracks? Tell me what you need, tell me why I should help, and I'll see what I can do. In memory of Elphaba. You knew her." Her head titled again, but up, t...
I couldn't help thinking that if I, by pure chance, had found a whole universe in a single unknown book, buried in that endless necropolis, tens of thousands more would remain unexplored, forgotten forever. I felt myself surrounded by millions of aba...
There's a scientific hypothesis that every person's name is a primary suggestive command that contains the entire script of their life in highly concentrated form. . . . According to this point of view, there is only a limited number of names, becaus...
What is the purpose of writing music? One is, of course, not dealing with purposes but dealing with sounds. Or the answer must take the form of a paradox: a purposeful purposeless or a purposeless play. This play, however, is an affirmation of life--...
I had not known before that love is obedience. You want to love, and you can’t, and you hate yourself because you can’t, and all the time love is not some marvelous thing that you feel but some hard thing that you do. And this in a way is easier ...
Nothing feeds forgetfulness better than war.... We all keep quiet and they try to convince us that what we've seen, what we've done, what we've learned about ourselves and about others, is an illusion, a passing nightmare. Wars have no memory, and no...
Why are you looking at me like that?’’ he asked, his hand tensing for a second on my hip. “No reason.’’ I moved my hand up his chest and on the way his abs contracted. He pushed me away abruptly, forcing me to sit up with him. With the scru...
A writer - and, I believe, generally all persons - must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humili...
How does one become a writer, Harry? By never giving up. You know, Marcus, that freedom-the desire for freedom-is a war in itself. We live in a society of defeated office workers, and to get ourselves out of this fix, we must fight-against ourselves ...
To each is given its moment in the blaze, its spark to be surrendered to another when it is sent, so that the blaze may go on. None may deny its spark to the general blaze and live forever. Each is sent to another someday. You are sent; you are on yo...
My Manager forced me to put my beetle in my own ear, a clear waste and an act that gave me nightmares: of a burning city through which giant carnivorous lizards prowled, eating survivors off of balconies. In one particularly vivid moment, I stood on ...
Francie had heard swearing since she had heard words. Obscenity and profanity had no meaning as such among those people. They were emotional expressions of inarticulate people with small vocabularies; they made a kind of dialect. The phrases could me...
Maintaining connections with family and community across class boundaries demands more than just summary recall of where one’s roots are, where one comes from. It requires knowing, naming, and being ever-mindful of those aspects of one’s past tha...
Francie always remembered what that kind teacher told her. “You know, Francie, a lot of people would think that these stories that you’re making up all the time were terrible lies because they are not the truth as people see the truth. In the fut...
Her time has come," answered Miss Lizzie. "That's why I didn't marry Harvey - long ago when he asked me. I was afraid of 'that'. So afraid." "I don't know," Miss Lizzie said. "Sometimes I think it's better to suffer bitter unhappiness and to fight an...
Jiko: "Surfer, wave, same thing." "That's just stupid, " I said. " A surfer's a person. A wave is a wave. How can they be the same?" Jiko looked out across the ocean to where the water met the sky. "A wave is born from deep conditions of the ocean. A...