Er, why do you need to work in a dark room, though?" he said. "The imps don't need it, do they?" "Ah, zis is for my experiment," said Otto proudly. "You know zat another term for an iconographer would be 'photographer'? From the old word in Latation,...
I am so sad. I am so sad it makes me heavier than the sum of my parts. I shift, restless, but it doesn’t help. It’s like—time. All this time in here is on me, has its hooks in me. Maybe if I sleep more, I’ll wake up and I’ll feel different,...
...I realized how naive I was. My aunt Tina was right: this stuff does exist, and it does hurt people, and although there are lots of people at Liberty who condemn violence against gays--including Dr. Falwell himself--the number of students who want ...
As a young man just beginning to publish some short fiction in the t&a magazines, I was fairly optimistic about my chances of getting published; I knew that I had some game, as the basketball players say these days, and I also felt that time was on m...
You made me dinner, so I made myself vomit—twice. Once to clear some room in my full stomach so I could eat, and the second time as an expression of what I thought about your cooking.
We can be much, much more than we were taught in teachers college... more than stern ladies at the front of the room who teach children to recite by rote. We can be, we MUST BE, learning partners, champions, observers, explorers, friends- and , for t...
Being a mother is like trying to hold a wolf by the ears,” Gram said. “If you have three or four –or more – chickabiddies, you’re dancing on a hot griddle all the time. You don’t have time to think about anything else. And if you’ve onl...
This was a great magic. Festin had no more performed it than has any man who in exile or danger longs for the earth and waters of his home, seeing and yearning over the doorsill of his house, the table where he has eaten, the branches outside the win...
There was a lull. Sammy was staring across the room at George Opdyke, the three-time Pulitzer Prize winner. I was about to say he was lost in thought, but Sammy was never really lost, and he never actually thought, for that implied deep reflection. H...
door I thought about life and how it resembled a ladder. Do you ever feel that way? Like life is one big uphill climb and there are always more people and circumstances tripping us and trying to pull us back down the ladder, while very, very few peop...
Letting there be room for not knowing is the most important thing of all. When there's a big disappointment, we don't know if that's the end of the story. It may just be the beginning of a great adventure. Life is like that. We don't know anything. W...
I was sent a copy of Richard Dawkins' amusing book, The God Delusion, by an anonymous donor, so I feel I should at least try to review it. This isn't easy. I got as far as page 36 before chucking it across the room in disgust. I was in the Boston Tea...
When they are away, you will often look for the baby doll, but it is not always there, where it is supposed to be, where you left it. Sometimes The Baby moves it, or she takes it with her, and you have to settle for some other toy. You bring it into ...
He spent the next hours watching her sleep, taking in every detail of her face, of her body. The way the soft glow of the bedside lamp cast shadows on her cheeks. The way her chest rose and fell with each breath. And when the first light of dawn fina...
it is so dark now with the sadness of people they were tricked, they were taught to expect the ultimate when nothing is promised now young girls weep alone in small rooms old men angrily swing their canes at visions as ladies comb their hair as ants ...
Because she hides. She doesn't realize it, I don't think, but she hides. Sometimes right in front of you. She can be sitting across from you at a table in a nice dining room somewhere and the expression on her face changes suddenly and she disappears...
Writing is finally about one thing: going into a room alone and doing it. Putting words on paper that have never been there in quite that way before. And although you are physically by yourself, the haunting Demon never leaves you, that Demon being t...
He lived with his mother, father and sister; had a room of his own, with the fourth-floor windows staring on seas of rooftops and the glitter of winter nights when home lights brownly wave beneath the heater whiter blaze of stars--those stars that in...
The inkstand is full of ink, and the paper lies white and unspotted, in the round of light thrown by a candle. Puffs of darkness sweep into the corners, and keep rolling through the room behind his chair. The air is silver and pearl, for the night is...
Here are two facts that should not both be true: - There is sufficient food produced in the world every year to feed every human being on the planet. - Nearly 800 million people literally go hungry every day, with more than a third of the earth's pop...
Surely it is an odd way to spend your life - sitting alone in a room with a pen in your hand, hour after hour, day after day, year after year, struggling to put words on pieces of paper in order to give birth to what does not exist, except in your he...
