Anger is a consuming thing, a burning takeover. It sets up shop in your heart and head and murders anything else attempting to makes it way in. Life becomes obsessed with it, clouded with it, engrossed in it. You justify feeling with delusions that y...
I should go," I said thickly. "Let me know when you want to start practice again. And thanks for...talking." I started to turn; then I heard him say abruptly, "No." I glanced back. "What?" He held my gaze, and something warm and wonderful and powerfu...
I can't go to Amsterdam. One of my doctors thinks it's a bad idea." He was quiet for a second. "God," he said. "I should've just paid for it myself. Should've just taken you straight from the Funky Bones to Amsterdam." "But then I would've had a prob...
In theory, sure, Gregor could still go home. Pack up his three-year-old sister, Boots, get his mom out of the hospital, where she was recovering from the plague, and have his bat, Ares, fly them back up to the laudry room of their appartment building...
Actually, the “leap of faith”—to give it the memorable name that Soren Kierkegaard bestowed upon it—is an imposture. As he himself pointed out, it is not a “leap” that can be made once and for all. It is a leap that has to go on and on be...
You come to this place, mid-life. You don’t know how you got here, but suddenly you’re staring fifty in the face. When you turn and look back down the years, you glimpse the ghosts of other lives you might have led; all houses are haunted. The wr...
I came to get you. I knew you'd freak out." "But..." My head still feels like a helium balloon. " ?" Nick looks blank. "Because you always freak out." I shake my head. My voice feels like I've swallowed it. "I mean, why do you care if I freak out?" T...
It wasn't always like this. There was a time when I imagined my life could happen in another way. It's true that early on I became used to the long hours I spent alone. I discovered that I did not need people as others did. After writing all day it t...
Over the plains of Ethiopia the sun rose as I had not seen it in seven years. A big, cool, empty sky flushed a little above a rim of dark mountains. The landscape 20,000 feet below gathered itself from the dark and showed a pale gleam of grass, a she...
You have worked to build me what I asked for all the days of our lives. Even when the task seemed impossible, even when it would have been easier to give it up, you did not, but kept on going. You have kept me warm in winter, and cool in summer. You ...
I have found that if I tend to a person’s illness rather than to the person, I am going to treat that person as if they are their illness. In doing so, I run the risk of limiting them greatly and helping them to focus in on their illness as if that...
Ten minutes ago, Frank though he was going to prison. Now he knows he’s not, and part of him thinks he should just be glad he’s getting out of this at all, but he’s not. He’s not glad. He’s furious. He’s known the world is broken for a lo...
Amazing how the most obvious things escape your notice. Maybe the truth is exactly the things you don't notice. Maybe the aim to see and tell the truth is inherently futile, a contradiction in terms, and it's exactly those things about oneself and th...
You have to be very specific when it comes to magic,” A-Through-L said sheepishly. “You must say things as carefully as you can. Magic is like a machine that only does exactly what you tell it to do. So you have to speak to it in a way it can und...
Roman ignored her and took her ankles and flipped them purposefully, but because of her hands she could not turn all the way and ended up with her legs scissored unintuitively, and suddenly things were different. Ashley had heard girls tell stories o...
It is always as it was between Achilles and Homer: one person has the experience, the sensation, the other it. A real writer only gives words to the affects and experiences of others; he is an artist in divining a great deal from the little that he h...
In the end, Astrid couldn’t do anything about my . . . turning into light, but she made a prediction. She said the sun would help me and I would be cured thanks to its efforts.’ ‘The sun?’ ‘Yes. It was the symbol I drew from among the runes...
DBT's catchphrase of developing a life worth living means you're not just surviving; rather, you have good reasons for living. I'm also getting better at keeping another dialectic in mind: On the one hand, the disorder decimates all relationships and...
Being a woman is worse than being a farmer there is so much harvesting and crop spraying to be done: legs to be waxed, underarms shaved, eyebrows plucked, feet pumiced, skin exfoliated and moisturised, spots cleansed, roots dyed, eyelashes tinted, na...
A demigod!" one snarled. "Eat it!" yelled another. But that's as far as they got before I slashed a wide arc with Riptide and vaporized the entire front row of monsters. "Back off!" I yelled at the rest, trying to sound fierce. Behind them stood thei...
Jill's face was hard when PE ended, and I had the feeling she was trying not to cry. I tried talking to her in the locker room, but she simply shook her head and headed off for the showers. I was about to go there myself when I heard a shriek. Those ...
