Holy shadows of the dead, I am not to blame for your cruel and bitter fate, but the accursed rivalry which brought sister nations and brother people to fight one another. I do not feel happy for this victory of mine. On the contrary, I would be glad,...
It is now my intention to draw out from the story of Abraham the dialectical consequences inherent in it, expressing them in the form of problemata , in order to see what a tremendous paradox faith is, a paradox which is capable of transforming a mur...
He’d passed the longest night of his life locked in mortal combat with his ghosts, calling up and then disavowing twenty years of memories. He would banish that bitch from his heart if it meant cutting her out with his own dagger. And when at last ...
I could take a walk with my wife and try to explain the ghosts I can't stop speaking to. Or I could read all those books piling up about the beginning of the end of understanding... Meanwhile, it's such a beautiful morning, the changing colors, the h...
There is a moment between waking and sleeping and between sleeping and waking when the mind seems to be in many places at once, when memories mingle with dreams, when what has been and what is yet to be exist side by side, and when the mind slips fre...
His act was rather that of a harmless lunatic than an enemy. We were not so new to the country as not to know that the solitary life of many a plainsman had a tendency to develop eccentricities of conduct and character not always easily distinguishab...
There is an old saying that goes 'Start by plucking a hair, end by killing a man'. It is also said, 'Two hands must meet to make a sound'. The atrocities that happened here weren't carried out by strangers - it was us, the people who'd once lived tog...
The tales of pure terror, of course, are completely naturalistic in their content, and must stand or fall by their merit alone. But what about the supernatural stories? Can we, the children of a scientific age, give any credence to these medleys of d...
Here," Myrnin said, his voice still gentle and low. "Amelie said you had to work. No one said you had to work alone." He picked up the next part and slotted it in, took the screwdriver from Claire's numbed fingers, and fastened it with a couple of de...
Does it give you deja voodoo how alike the houses are?" "That's deja vu, and I hate you right now." "For narcing on you to your mom? Wait until you hear what I tell your dad." From the sly grin on his face, she knew what he was thinking. "Don't you e...
She was almost at the top of the steps, and Shane was right behind her, when she heard Myrnin say, in a quiet voice that was like the old Myrnin, the one she actually liked, "I'm sorry, Claire. I never meant - I'm sorry. Sometimes I don't know... I d...
Though she’d begun to get a bit fat that winter, it was in February, around when her father found a toy poodle (sitting there, in the side yard, watchful and waiting as a person), and adopted it, that a weightlessness entered into Chelsea’s blood...
Every mother can easily imagine losing a child. Motherhood is always half loss anyway. The three-year-old is lost at five, the five-year-old at nine. We consort with ghosts, even as we sit and eat with, scold and kiss, their current corporeal forms. ...
You’re not going to disappear,” I said. “I won’t let you”. “Even if this is all there is? Going to school and working at my uncle’s restaurant and fighting with Mari? Why would anyone want to remember this?” “I want to remember you....
No." I pulled away just enough to lock my eyes with his. His crooked smile sent shivers down my spine. His eyes were a deep blue darkening more as the minutes passing between us were getting hotter. "I will be the one using you, and you'll love every...
I have a hardcore attitude: a “self-published, ghost-written book” is wrong because the concept behind self publishing is that you have knowledge or emotions that you want to express. When people read a book—particularly a self-published one—...
The ocean of the past, I still hide from so much of it and rely on all that I don't run from. Everything before him, I waited for the nightmare to end, and it did when he accepted me into his arms. It was a new birth, a new life, but it flashed too b...
With the compelling convincingness of dreams, which are vague yet exact, the ghost voice draws us (to ourselves and all of our component selves), lifts them casually out of the well of the past--the well wherein nothing is lost, the deep well of forg...
Momentarily drained of lust, he stares at the remembered contortions to which it has driven him. His life seems a sequence of grotesque poses assumed to no purpose, a magic dance empty of belief. the two thoughts come at once, in one slow wave. He fe...
The Chinese food arrives. Delicious saliva fills his mouth. He really hasn't had any since Texas. He loves this food that contains no disgusting proofs of slain animals, a bloody slab of cow haunch, a hen's sinewy skeleton; these ghosts have been min...
The mere mention of the Farakka Express, which jerks its way eastward each day from Delhi to Calcutta, is enough to throw even a seasoned traveller into fits of apoplexy. At a desert encampment on Namibia's Skeleton Coast, a hard-bitten adventurer ha...
