And not just the right thing; it’s profoundly the right thing to do, because the one argument for accessibility that doesn’t get made nearly often enough is how extraordinarily better it makes some people’s lives. How many opportunities do we h...
Then you don't know. You can't know what it feels like to meet a person and suddenly know without a doubt that the whole purpose of your life so far-every choice you made, every twist of fate along the way-was just a journey to get you to that person...
I know what you must think of me,' [the Doctor] said, his voice so slow. It was like a voice designed for laughing that didn't get to do it often. 'I'm going to tell you a story about a man who travels, and everywhere he goes, he makes everyone's liv...
I only had two real tasks [while in Norway]: gathering dead trees to burn from the surrounding small forest and getting water from a hole in a frozen stream. The rest of the time I wandered around, obsessed over my life dramas, stared into space, rea...
She murmured, "You're unfinished." "Aye, precisely." "I need to go." When she moved to get up, he shoved her against his side and slapped her arse to keep her there. "You stay with me." She snapped, "What do you want from me, Chase?" He drew his head...
As the biggest library if it is in disorder is not as useful as a small but well-arranged one, so you may accumulate a vast amount of knowledge but it will be of far less value to you than a much smaller amount if you have not thought it over for you...
There were no milestones in the Copper Country. Often a traveler could only measure the progress of a journey by the time it took to get from each spoiled or broken thing to the next: a half-day’s walk from a dry well to the muzzle of a cannon poki...
I thought maybe if she could express herself rather than suffer herself, if she had a way to relieve the burden, she lived for nothing more than living, with nothing to get inspired by, to care for, to call her own, she helped out at the store, then ...
Perhaps soul mates don’t exist, I thought. Maybe they were only a way to get over a loss that couldn’t be forgotten, a way to mend a heart that was unredeemable—an aberrant remedy that dissolved long before the healing began. A way to love a nu...
In the morning I brush my teeth with hope, and at night before bed I brush them with defeat. Both are mint flavored, so I try not to get them mixed up.
Getting out of a marriage is rough, though, and not just for the legal / financial complications or the massive lifestyle upheaval. (As my friend Deborah once advised me wisely: "Nobody ever died from splitting up furniture.") It's the emotional reco...
How quickly self rises to the surface, and the instrument is ready to believe he is something more than an instrument! How sadly easy it is to make of the very service God entrusts us with a pedestal on which to display ourselves. But God will not sh...
She shifted in his pocket, pressing her back against his chest. "It's iron." Instead of walking into the elevator, he glanced down at her. If he kept craning his neck this way, he was going to have a hell of a nasty headache by the time he made it ho...
Just that dwelling and planning is bullshit, you dwell on the past, you can’t move forward. Spend too much time planning for the future and you just push yourself backwards, or you stay stagnant in the same place all your life. Live in the moment, ...
The obscenities of this country are not girls like you. It is the poverty which is obscene, and the criminal irresponsibility of the leaders who make this poverty a deadening reality. The obscenities in this country are the places of the rich, the ne...
There are very few friends that will lie down with you on empty streets in the middle of the night, without a word. No questions, no asking why, just quietly lay there with you, observing the stars, until you're ready to get back up on your feet agai...
Before that night, I didn't grasp that the shadows that sometimes crossed her face weren't momentary clouds passing in front of the sun. Her deep silences were more than daydreams. And her habit of standing with her arms wrapped around her ribs was a...
When we are young, we spend much time and pains in filling our note-books with all definitions of Religion, Love, Poetry, Politics, Art, in the hope that, in the course of a few years, we shall have condensed into our encyclopaedia the net value of a...
When you can do that, little Wren, when you can accept the wearing down and the eroding, then you can do anything. How did I manage to keep going out nights? I just told myself I didn’t matter all that much—that those in here mattered more. You k...
Gripping her wrists, he pinned her tight to the vanity. “That sex as a weapon thing can only get you so far, Tess.” Wanna bet? “I’m not damaged, cowboy. I don’t have hang-ups about my body, I don’t use sex to mask my problems”—much—...
Because here's the thing―we don't give a shit about fairness here. We're soldiers. Soldiers do not give the other guy a sporting chance. Soldiers shoot in the back, lay traps and ambushes, lie to the enemy and outnumber the other bastard every chan...