So against the grain I serve to produce events and do what’s irrational because I am commanded to. For all their indisputable intelligence, men take this farce as something serious, and that is their tragedy. They suffer, of course… but then they...
Memories of the past year came tumbling down on me. The recent changes and reverses were almost overwhelming. I was learning that life flowed like a river. When the run-off was normal, the water ran smoothly. But if there came a downpour, it gushed. ...
A great discovery solves a great problem, but there is a grain of discovery in the solution of any problem. Your problem may be modest, but if it challenges your curiosity and brings into play your inventive faculties, and if you solve it by your own...
This is a book about Heaven. I know it now. It floats among us like a cloud and is the realest thing we know and the least to be captured, the least to be possessed by anybody for himself. It is like a grain of mustard seed, which you cannot see amon...
Oh, the comfort - the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person - having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all right out, just as they are, chaff and grain together; certain that a faithful hand will take and sif...
… our 'Physick' and 'Anatomy' have embraced such infinite varieties of being, have laid open such new worlds in time and space, have grappled, not unsuccessfully, with such complex problems, that the eyes of and of might be dazzled by the sight of ...
I was terrified of my weakness, of my sharp tongue, of my every flaw. I was terrified that this moment, my chance to live in happiness for however short a time we may have had, would be ruined because I was simply not carved out of the same wood as h...
Our group pressed west on what was left of Highway 93, toward the pass leading to Las Vegas. Sand covered the road in loose drifts so deep the horses' hooves sank into them. The metal highway signs were bent low by the strong wind, and above us, bill...
Thanks to my mother, I was raised to have a morbid imagination. When I was a child, she often talked about death as warning, as an unavoidable matter of fact. Little Debbie's mom down the block might say, 'Honey, look both ways before crossing the st...
One night I dreamed I was walking along the beach with the Lord. Many scenes from my life flashed across the sky. In each scene I noticed footprints in the sand. Sometimes there were two sets of footprints, other times there was one only. This bother...
Behrani: [Praying for his dying son] Please, God, don't take my joon-am. I make my nazr. My nazr, hear me, please to hear me. I will give everything to one who is less fortunate. Yes! I will make it for the broken bird. Please, God, I'm making nazr t...
[talking with Nadi] Kathy: I grew up in this house. It's the house that my father left to me and my brother when he died. The county evicted me from this house by mistake and your husband bought it and now, he won't sell it back for less than four ti...
Behrani: [to Kathy] You think you can frighten me? You think you can frighten me with your stupid deputy coming here telling me lies? [Grabs Kathy by the arm and frog-marches her down the path] Behrani: What do you think I am? Tell me that. Am I stup...
A moment later, he plopped down on the sand beside her, and when they accidentally touched, Gabby had the briefest flash of them sitting together just like this on a hundred different weekends in the future.
I write because I hope.I write because I have faith. Hope.Hope alike a fresh flower grows in the sand of my heart . Faith.Faith alike the Sea will be perishing only when Sea disappears .
What an incredible thing! How much less they had than other human beings. Mentally retarded, deaf, mute - and still eagerly sanding benches.
a quick turn around a corner and my planet becomes sand on the shore of a dying Universe
I didn't despise myself for being who I was, and I never would. I wouldn't allow anyone to make me feel bad about that. That was a line I could draw in the sand.
Were you lying?" "I never lie," he said piously. "About what?" "The sand, the snake." For a young man who never lied, he seemed surprisingly unoffended by the question.
I forgive him and like water draining from the sand after a wave, the power he held over me disappears. A slow smile rises on my face.
He smelled the salt on his own lips and the orange blossoms in her hair. Real ones, he could see now, tucked into the curls with cheap, native combs. The sight of them gave him hope.
