The world is like a river with sludge lying at the bottom. On sunny days, the water appears to be clear and inviting, but inevitably, a storm comes along, forcing the sludge to the surface, muddying the water. When that happens, you become aware of i...
Depression has been likened to both a black cloud and a black dog. For someone like Kelsea, the black cloud is the right metaphor. She is surrounded by it, immersed within it, and there is no obvious way out. What she needs to do is try to contain it...
My mother hasn’t asked the questions that a normal person would ask, and I’m grateful for it. It’s like the world has become so crazy that it makes sense to her now. I turn on the engine and drive us out. ‘Thanks, Mom. For coming to rescue me...
My head seems to be rumbling. Then I realize it’s the sky. It’s thunder. Suddenly, warm raindrops fall on us, spraying us until we’re completely wet. Raffe ignores it and continues to kiss me. We hold each other, pressing tighter and harder tog...
This is what love does: It makes you want to rewrite the world. It makes you want to choose the characters, build the scenery, guide the plot. The person you love sits across from you, and you want to do everything in your power to make it possible, ...
I always found in myself a dread of west and love of east. Where I ever got such an idea I cannot say, unless it could be that morning came over the peaks of the Gabilans and the night drifted back from the ridges of the Santa Lucias. It may be that ...
Why covet a knowledge of new facts? Day and night, house and garden, a few books, a few actions, serve us as well as would all trades and all spectacles. We are far from having exhausted the significance of the few symbols we use. We can come to use ...
I don't know if you have any idea what a high school in Paris is like in this day and age in the posh neighborhoods—but quite honestly, the slummy banlieues of Marseille have nothing on ours. In fact it may even be worse here, because where you hav...
Don't eat bear balls. Eat healthy, delectable, plant-based foods so that you will never fall over on your cat.
Anybody can learn to think, or believe, or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel... the moment you feel, you're nobody ― but-yourself ― in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else ― means to ...
I saved a man's life once," said Granny. "Special medicine, twice a day. Boiled water with a bit of berry juice in it. Told him I'd bought it from the dwarves. That's the biggest part of doct'rin, really. Most people'll get over most things if they p...
These people you used to see every day, friends or acquaintances, after a while they become as distant as any stranger, people you suddenly recall late at night--you remember something they said or something silly that someone once did. For a few mom...
From the day after we lose someone, how we lost them doesn't matter. All that matters now is that they're gone, and there's absolutely no more interacting with that person. There's just the memories. And those memories will come pelting at you at ran...
American dream, a spouse, a brace of children, cuddly pets, coffee-table books, rusted skeleton keys, plastic cauliflower bags, business cards of business-card printers, a mound of used airmail envelopes. Old house on moving day, all echoes and lonel...
Please please read. Everything and anything. You may not remember all of it, you may not remember any of it But from the fairytailes...to the sweeping soaring classics I hope you will one day discover for yourself, all those words--those lives and ch...
How often do you ignore a dream, dismiss it as fantasy and then see echoes of the dream around you the following day? What if a dream were the forewarning of what will become your reality; if you are being told within the world of a dream what may oc...
Oh, don’t worry, I am perfectly aware of the fantasy involved here, but what we want is almost never exempt from the impossible. That barrier has very little meaning for me these days. Given what’s happened, is just a blind spot that dissolves if...
He'd noticed that sex bore some resemblance to cookery: it fascinated people, they sometimes bought books full of complicated recipes and interesting pictures, and sometimes when they were really hungry they created vast banquets in their imagination...
I could’ve knocked the shit out of her .She’d have good reason to roll her eyes then. But knocking the shit out of rude people wasn’t my style. Heckling them every chance I got was. Hopefully she’d screw up soon. I didn’t have all day.
You’re like that single wild flower that grows from the crack in the pavement: miraculous growth with no water source or fertile soil. A person walking by would step around that flower to avoid crushing it. It’s not like the field of wild flowers...
I was crazy in love with you in high school, and you broke my heart the day you hooked up with someone else our sophomore year. Then you broke it again when you promised me you’d dump him the night we kissed and go out with me instead, because the ...