One of the most inefficient utopias I have ever seen was that of a humble Zapatista village in the mountains of Southeastern Mexico. I kid you not, the entire village sits down and takes days to make a single decision! Everyone gets a chance to hear ...
The directness of her question throws me. "I don't know. Sometimes I think there are only so many opportunities...to get together with someone. And we've both screwed up so many times"- my voice grows quiet - "that we've missed our chance." "Anna." M...
I would like to hear your life as you heard it, coming at you, instead of hearing it as I do, a sober sound of expectations reduced, desires blunted, hopes deferred or abandoned, chances lost, defeats accepted, griefs borne. I don't find your life un...
Man is more perfect than god. Although this woman's doctrine, in which she was brought up from childhood, told her than all men were lost sinners, I have never heard her censure a man with so much as half a word. All her life is symbolized in the onl...
You take what you want at the end of a gun, you murder and rape and steal, and you call it bringing civilization. And what is civilization, to you, but us being properly grateful to be murdered and raped and stolen from? You said you knew justice whe...
The idea that boys want to sleep with their mothers strikes most men as the silliest thing they have ever heard. Obviously, it did not seem so to Freud, who wrote that as a boy he once had an erotic reaction to watching his mother dressing. But Freud...
Have you ever heard of such a thing as a phone?" I snapped. "You could have called so we knew you weren't dead." My anger bounced off him. "I see my diabolical plan has worked," he observed. "What plan?" I asked with narrow eyes. "Absence makes the h...
The authors of the gospels, like all writers in all time periods, either reference information they have at hand – including things they’ve heard or read – or they make things up. . . For reference material, the author of Mark relied not on Jes...
She had heard it said that, before you could understand anybody, you needed to walk a mile in their shoes, which did not make a whole lot of sense, because probably AFTER you had walked a mile in their shoes, you would understand that they were chasi...
You sometimes heard about the marginally talented wives of powerful men publishing children's books or designing handbags or, most commonly, becoming photographers. There might even be a show of the wife's work in a well-known but slightly off galler...
Sleep would be so welcome. A warm blanket of black to erase everything else. Sleep without dreams. I've heard people talk about the sleep of the dead. Is that what death would feel like? The nicest, warmest, heaviest never-ending nap? If that's what ...
How sweet is that? I know I'm no boy expert, but I have heard entire lectures on reading body language, and I have to say that assuming that a person will have forgotten your name is way high on my "indicators of humbleness" list (not that I have one...
Sometimes I knew in all my mind and heard why I had done what I had done, and I welcomed the sacrifice. But there were times too when I lived in a desert and felt no joy and saw no hope and could not remember my old feelings. Then I lived by faith al...
The hiss of the quenched element, the breakage of the pitcher which I had flung from my hand when I had emptied it, and, above all, the splash of the shower-bath I had liberally bestowed, roused Mr Rochester at last though it was dark, I knew he was ...
Thank you,” she whispered, sending up a quick prayer for his continued recovery. “You’re welcome,” Marcus murmured. Honoria let out a little shriek of surprise, jumping back nearly a foot. “Sorry,” he said, but he was laughing. It was qui...
...one could accept Muhammad as a genuine mystic—just as one could accept Joan of Arc's voices as having genuinely been heard by her, or the revelations of Saint John the Divine as being that troubled soul's 'real' experiences—without needing als...
Axsem would say nothing more to any of them. No sooner had Fallon released him than he fled deep into the trees, staff in hand, with Hailos following after. Through the morning air, they heard the wail of his mourning. The scarred heart of the genera...
We saw Uncle Jack every Christmas, and every Christmas he yelled across the street for Miss Maudie to come marry him. Miss Mauide would yell back, "Call a little louder, Jack Finch, and they'll hear you the post office, I haven't heard you yet!" Jem ...
Before this war is over,' [Walter] said - or something said through his lips - 'every man and woman and child in Canada will feel it - you, Mary, will feel it - feel it to your heart's core. You will weep tears of blood over it. The Piper has come - ...
Backlock, a poet blind from his birth, could describe visual objects with accuracy; Professor Sanderson, who was also blind, gave excellent lectures on color, and taught others the theory of ideas which they had and he had not. In the social sphere t...
Boomer had asked her once, in a telephone call from Virginia, “Why does this stuff, these hand-painted hallucinations that don’t do nothin’ but confuse the puddin’ out of a perfectly reasonable wall, why does it mean so much to you?” It was...
