Wayne: You wanna know why I really came to find you? Waxilliam: Why? Wayne: I thought of you happy in a comfy bed, resting and relaxing, spending the rest of your life sipping tea and reading papers while people bring you food and maids rub your toes...
I was angry with him before. I’m not really sure why. Maybe I was just angry that the world had become such a complicated place, that I have never known even a fraction of the truth about it. Or that I allowed myself to grieve for someone who was n...
I just wanted to thank you' he says, his voice low. 'A group of scientists told you that my genes were damaged, that there was something wrong with me - they showed you the test results that proved it. And even I started to believe it.' He touches my...
Breathless I look up at him and find him gazing at me with a wonder that my deep-seated insecurity finds hard to believe. Then he does this thing. His fingers start moving on my face, tracing outlines. They trail along my eyebrows, the ridge of my no...
The moment you stop smoking, everything that goes wrong in your life is blamed on the fact that you’ve stopped smoking. Now when you have a mental block, instead of just getting on with it you start to say, ‘If only I could light up now, it would...
He knew that any given thing on the face of the earth could reveal the history of all things. One could open a book to any page, or look at a person's hand; one could turn a card, or watch the flight of birds... whatever the thing observed, one could...
I could no longer remember the way my mother's eyes looked before the slowing. Had they always been so red around the edges? Surely, those pockets of gray beneath her lower lashes were new. She still wasn't sleeping well, but perhaps what I was seein...
For every one pupil who needs to be guarded against a weak excess of sensibility there are three who need to be awakened from the slumber of cold vulgarity. The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts. The right...
Judging Natalie as my mother had judged me was, I felt like telling her son, just my ass-backward way of showing love. I'd spent my life trying to translate that language, and now I realized I had come to speak it fluently. When was it that you reali...
The next time you have the urge to complain, stop and ask yourself what it is you truly want. Do you just want to complain or do you want to improve your situation? Somewhere within each complaint is a genuine desire to improve things, but the compla...
Joe Spork opens the door. The man departs. Joe turns to Polly to say something about how they’re obviously not going to Portsmouth, and finds an oyster knife balanced on his cheek, just under his eye. “Can we be very clear,” Polly Cradle murmur...
There's something I would like to understand. And I don't think anyone can explain it. . . There's your life. You begin it, feeling that it's something so precious and rare, so beautiful that it's like a sacred treasure. Now it's over and it doesn't ...
There is a part of me that no one ever sees. I hide behind a mask of heavy make-up and ever-changing hair and clothing. I try to reinvent myself. It doesn’t work. There are times when I am bone-crushingly sad. I just want to curl into a ball and hi...
As parents, we sometimes mistakenly assume that things were always this way. They weren't. The modern family is just that - modern - and all of our places in it are quite new. Unless we keep in mind how new our lives as parents are, and how unusual a...
I've never been able to write poetry without having vast tracts of dead time. Poetry requires a certain kind of disciplined indolence that the world, including many prose writers, doesn't recognize as discipline. It is, though. It's the discipline to...
I don’t want to see Bev get hurt. Not after all those years of shoveling Roger’s shit, and um…this is awkward. I’m just wondering—” “I’m keeping her,” Tom finally said with exasperation. John choked on his beer. “You’re keeping ...
...he'll come back. We all come back, kate. These private little revolutions always die. The compromise is always made. In a peculiar way. Frank is right-- every man does have a star. The star of one's honesty. And you spend your life groping for it,...
As a doc, though, I've seen what happens when people are under a lot of stress. Doesn't always bring out their best. When people are scared, they get angry. They'll do things they never thought they would. They'll bargain and compromise in order to s...
There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for me ...
What people still do not like to admit is that there were two crimes in the form of one. Just as the destruction of Jewry was the necessary condition for the rise and expansion of Nazism, so . I first noticed this point when reading an essay by the l...
If I was smart now, I would simply walk back the way I had come instead of proceeding forward into the face of danger. Obviously there was a part of me that had considered facing the two vânătors alone and had decided that was a good idea. Perhaps ...
