We stepped a little quicker, laughed a little louder and chatted over the fences a little longer. We gathered bouquets of wildflowers, dined on fresh strawberries and began to ride our bikes up and down the Third Line again. We ran up grassy hills an...
You're fucked. You thought you were going to be someone, but now it's obvious you're nobody. You haven't got as much talent as you thought you had, and there was no Plan B, and you got no skills and no education, and now you're looking at forty or fi...
That's how I do this life sometimes by making the ordinary just like magic and just like a card trick and just like a mirror and just like disappearing. Every Indian learns how to be a magician and learns how to misdirect attention and the dark hand ...
In those years I did not care to enjoy sex, only to have it. That is what seeing Alex again on Fifth Avenue brought back to me - a youth of fascinated, passionless copulation. There they are, figures in a discoloured blur, young men and not so young,...
In the front was a man he knew only as “Samson,” a big man that from all appearances was a former juice head gym rat with exquisitely defined muscles, stripped to the waist and carrying a huge nine foot cross hewn from raw timber and held togethe...
For time and eternity there have been fathers like Nathan who simply can see no way to have a daughter but to own her like a plot of land. To work her, plow her under, rain down a dreadful poison upon her. Miraculously, it causes these girls to grow....
Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding. Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain. Much of your pain is self-chosen. It is the bitter potion by which the phy...
As I thought of these things, I drew aside the curtains and looked out into the darkness, and it seemed to my troubled fancy that all those little points of light filling the sky were the furnaces of innumerable divine alchemists, who labour continua...
...she's leaving now. ... Janis attacks the back door of the school gym and finds herself in a heavy cloud of smoke. She realizes she's found the Goths' hangout. Who knew? "Oof," someone says. She keeps walking, muttering, "sorry" to whomever it was ...
When it's summer, people sit a lot. Or lie. Lie in the sense of recumbency. A good heavy book holds you down. It's an anchor that keeps you from getting up and having another gin and tonic. Many a person has been saved from summer alcoholism, not to ...
There’s very little that worrying can do to help our situations. Worrying is like running on a treadmill…it gives us an opportunity to sweat but gets us absolutely nowhere. Worrying skews our reality, suppresses the immune system, promotes corona...
An Evening Air I go out in the grey evening In the air the odor of flowers and the sounds of lamentation. I go out into the hard loneliness of the barren field of grey evening In the air the odor of flowers and the sounds of lamentation. In the gathe...
Obstinate are the trammels, but my heart aches when I try to break them. Freedom is all I want, but to hope for it I feel ashamed. I am certain that priceless wealth is in thee, and that thou art my best friend, but I have not the heart to sweep away...
Here is a boy who was waiting to be punished. But then, unexpectedly, he ¯nds that his fault has been overlooked or forgiven and at once the world reappears in brilliant colors, full of delightful prospects. Here is a soldier who was waiting, with a...
Why do you have such a nice Bible?” Kelsea asked. “The Bible is a book, Kelsea, a book that has influenced mankind for thousands of years. It deserves to be preserved in a good edition, just like any other important book.” “Do you believe it�...
But the death of spirit goes by another name. It is usually called the birth of reason. The dreams of reason are, at this late date, everywhere to be seen, much like headstones in a cemetery. The inertia of a standard which prunes every tree to the d...
Molly: [Andy is climbing up the ladder to the attic to put his toys away when Molly walks out of her room carrying a box] Uh! [a small heavy ball falls out of the box] Andy: You need a hand? Molly: I got it! Andy: Here. [he puts the ball back and pic...
Unlike modern pills, these hard antimony pills didn’t dissolve in the intestines, and the pills were considered so valuable that people rooted through fecal matter to retrieve and reuse them. Some lucky families even passed down laxatives from fath...
The will to truth is enshrined in the mind. It is undeniable, inescapable, mutable only if one’s humanity itself is rejected, itself muted. Yet the form of this truth, whether it be elaborate, simple, exclusive and regulatory or comprehensive and p...
The first building she reached appeared to be an old barn. Only one young guard stood before its bolted door, staring at her with wide eyes, holding up his sword in defense, She heated his sword and he dropped it, his expression barely changing, as i...
