...we think being a Christian means to go to church on Sunday and trying to be good through the week. Now I see it means suffering, being willing to let the hard things happen to you, so that God can use us to do His work on this earth!
Just easy. Life feels like it’s always hard. There’s never a calm way to get through it, to just breathe. Every day brings the same challenges, the same routines…the same everything. And as much as I hope the next day will be different, it’s ...
That’s my girl,” she said, her eyes holding a shared pain as she saw my confusion. “Al, where are you going to put her? Not in your room. She’d pull a line through you and kill you when you hog the blankets. I’ll take the waif in. I promise...
You have a long history," he said, when Lanya indicated her story was finished. "Ah, Harrier, were I to tell you a long story, we should be here for a sennight, perhaps more. Long stories are best saved for deep winter, when the days are short and ti...
For a second, I stared at the map of her veins just under the surface of her thin skin. It was like her body was trying to become diaphanous. Instead of getting harder and stronger and full of life as we age, we disappear slowly. Our skin thins and e...
Look at this one.” I picked up a small painting of a man with dark hair and a short, dark beard. He wore a loose shirt, cobalt blue, unbuttoned at the top, showing a prominent, knobby collarbone. He looked…complicated and hungry. She’d captured...
My dad used to say, ‘This is what your right arm’s for, son,’” John said. “This is the time and these are the people and I’d give my right arm to be a light, a comfort, to them. I know you would, too. In whatever form it takes. Use these ...
...I decided I'd changed my mind about home. Home was not Pensacola San Diego Guam or any of the other places we might have lived. In fact home wasn't any particular place at all. Home was my family. Even if they didn't get my jokes sometimes.
His mama put down the bag and headed for the door, her mouth a thin line. “Wait! What are you doing? Don’t go over there and yell at her.” Paul jumped off the stool and tried to beat her to the door. “Oh, honey, I would never do that.” His ...
You don’t have to walk me back. I live down the hall.” She smiled up at him. “My mama didn’t raise me like that,” Paul said, opening the door. “Actually, your mama has some sense, and would say, ‘She lives twenty feet away,’ but suit ...
Ugly and ungainly. The least dependable creature you ever met. Just when you think you understand her, she changes. If only I had a son," he said bitterly. Over and over he disparaged her, and George would have thought that Beatrice would be so used ...
There is also a third kind of madness, which is possession by the Muses, enters into a delicate and virgin soul, and there inspiring frenzy, awakens lyric....But he, who, not being inspired and having no touch of madness in his soul, comes to the doo...
Why are all reflections lovelier than what we call reality? -- not so grand or so strong, it may be, but always lovelier? Fair as is the gliding sloop on the shining sea, the wavering, trembling, unresting sail below is fairer still...All mirrors are...
Places are fragmentary and inward-turning histories, pasts that others are not allowed to read, accumulated times that can be unfolded but like stories held in reserve, remaining in an enigmatic state, symbolizations encysted in the pain or pleasure ...
These are the folk who may pass into the kingdom of heaven: the grief-stricken, lovers, scholars of a certain obsessive disposition. Brute beasts. Women who have become as men and men who have become as women. Writers of books with long titles. Only ...
Thou therefore on these Herbs, and Fruits, and Flow'rs Feed first, on each Beast next, and Fish, and Fowl, No homely morsels, and whatever thing The Scyth of Time mows down, devour unspar'd, Till I in Man residing through the Race, His thoughts, his ...
They become liberated spaces that can be occupied. A rich indetermination gives them, by means of a semantic rarefaction, the function of articulating a second, poetic geography on top of the geography of the literal, forbidden or permitted meaning. ...
Far richer they! I know the senses' witchery Guards us, like air, from heavens too big to see; Imminent death to man that barb'd sublimity And dazzling edge of beauty unsheathed would be. Yet here, within this tiny, charm'd interior, This parlour of ...
Ever since the Christmas of '53, I have felt that the yuletide is a special hell for those families who have suffered any loss or who must admit to any imperfection; the so-called spirit of giving can be as greedy as receiving--Christmas is our time ...
It's funny: one starts off thinking one is shrinkingly sensitive & intelligent & always one down & all the rest of it: then at thirty one finds one is a great clumping brute, incapable of appreciating anything finer than a kiss or a kick, roaring our...
At heart, I have always been a coper, I've mostly been able to walk around with my wounds safely hidden, and I've always stored up my deep depressive episodes for the weeks off when there was time to have an abbreviated version of a complete breakdow...
