During the 1992 election I concluded as early as my first visit to New Hampshire that Bill Clinton was hateful in his behavior to women, pathological as a liar, and deeply suspect when it came to money in politics. I have never had to take any of tha...
If you were offered the chance to live your own life again, would you seize the opportunity? The only real philosophical answer is automatically self-contradictory: 'Only if I did not know that I was doing so.' To go through the entire experience onc...
And, I think, this greening does thaw at the edges, at least, of my own cold season. Joy sneaks in: listening to music, riding my bicycle, I catch myself feeling, in a way that’s as old as I am but suddenly seems unfamiliar, light. I have felt so h...
When I missed the physical body of my partner, I meditated on its parts, tossed by the waves, torn, dispersed, and deteriorated. When memories of our lives together became acute and intense, I breathed. I breathed through each wave of yearning, of re...
One of the things I love about books is being able to define and condense certain portions of a character's life into chapters. It's intriguing, because you can't do this with real life. You can't just end a chapter, then skip the things you don't wa...
Whirrun ignored ‘em. ‘Then, when I’ve got two cut,’ and he dropped a pale slab of cheese on one slice then slapped the other on top like he was catching a fly, ‘I trap the cheese between then, and there you have it!’ ‘Bread and cheese.�...
This is stupid." "Look. You think how stupid people are most of the time. Old men drink. Women at a village fair. Boys throwing stones at birds. Life. The foolishness and the vanity, the selfishness and the waste. The pettiness, the silliness. You th...
I used to think I knew everything. I was a "smart person" who "got things done," and because of that, the higher I climbed, the more I could look down and scoff at what seemed silly or simple, even religion. But I realized something as I drove home t...
It’s all about our egos. She felt she was on the edge of understanding something important. They could fall in love with fresh, new people, or they could have the courage and humility to tear off some essential layer of themselves and reveal to eac...
The great mistake of contemporary life is that we have made such a virtue of intellectual growth while almost totally ignoring the necessity of conscience growth. We have failed to understand that individual evolution can take place not only in menta...
One day I found him amid large packages from which spilled attractive, glossy paperbacks with mythical covers. He had tried to use, as a "generator of ideas" — for we were running out of them — those works of fantastic literature, that popular ge...
What a vapid job title our culture gives to those honorable laborers the ancient Egyptians and Sumerians variously called Learned Men of the Magic Library, Scribes of the Double House of Life, Mistresses of the House of Books, or Ordainers of the Uni...
I am—yet what I am none cares or knows; My friends forsake me like a memory lost: I am the self-consumer of my woes— They rise and vanish in oblivious host, Like shadows in love’s frenzied stifled throes And yet I am, and live—like vapours to...
Look, I tell the T-ball mothers. Childhood is oppressive. I determine what the boy's eating and when. I tell him when he's going to bed and when he can get up. I tell him when he can speak and when he must remain silent. There are certain things he's...
As a leftover sixties liberal, I believe that the long arm and beady eyes of the government have no place in our bedrooms, our kitchens, or the backseats of our parked cars. But I also feel that the immediate appointment of a Special Pastry Prosecuto...
On game days, I could be in the worst mood imagiable-a really bad mood. But sometimes, I'd get a call from the Make-A-Wish Foundation-there would be people, sometimes kids, who anted to meet me before they died. And the foundation would call on a gam...
I asked myself what I believed. I had never prayed a lot. I hoped hard, wished hard, but I didn't pray. I had developed a certain distrust of organised religion growing up, but I felt I had the capacity to be a spiritual person, and to hold some ferv...
We were fortunate his brief psychic vision distracted him from what his fingertips could have told him about my face. Of course we were aware that temporary clairvoyance was a lame and unlikely explanation. The ordering of this world, however is so a...
What emerges from these separate strands of (modern) history is an image of man himself that bears a new, stark, more nearly naked, and more questionable aspect. The contraction of man's horizons amounts to a denudation, a stripping down, of this bei...
Do you know what I see in you now? The usual aura. A steady golden yellow, healthy and strong, with spikes of purple here and there. But when I do this. . . .” He rested a hand on my hip, and my whole body tensed up. That hand moved around my hip, ...
I notice he doesn't have his meteorite bag and see out the window it's probably going to pour any minute, but wee need to et out of here. Immediately. "We're going to search for meteorites," I say, like that's what most people do on winter mornings. ...
