I don't want to analyze myself or anything, but I think, in fact I know this to be true, that I enter the world through what I write. I grew up believing, and continue to believe, that I am a screw-up, that growing up with my family and friends, I ha...
You know the parlor trick. wrap your arms around your own body and from the back it looks like someone is embracing you her hands grasping your shirt her fingernails teasing your neck from the front it is another story you never looked so alone your ...
Keep me rather in this cage, and feed me sparingly, if you dare. Anything that brings me closer to illness and the edge of death makes me more faithful. It is only when you make me suffer that I feel safe and secure. You should never have agreed to b...
He was a son of the revolutionary movement when he and the revolutionary movement were still pristine. It was a special time for Filipino activists—a time when a hundred flowers bloomed and a thousand thoughts contended in a movement that did not k...
Of all the deep longings, this ache for missing intimacy, cuts through sharply, like a scream in a silent room, like the last gasping breath under a stifling mask, like the huge lump in the throat that one is unable to swallow. This deep ache to be h...
There are times when I'm caught up in everything and I have to say to myself, "Please feel good; please feel better; everything's okay; you're fine; things aren't falling apart; take a second; get back to a place where you realize that you don't actu...
To understand God we must understand ourselves. If I give you an apple and ask you, “What is that?” you reply, “An apple.” “How do you know it’s an apple?” “Because it just is.” “How did it get to be an apple?” “It came from a...
In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when we're done with it, we may find - if it's a good novel - that we're a bit different from ...
For those of us who take literature very seriously, picking up a work of fiction is the start of an adventure comparable in anticipatory excitement to what I imagine is felt by an athlete warming up for a competition, a mountain climber preparing for...
Stop being the shy boy that wants to do everything right and responsibly. I’m sick of your honorable intentions Eli. In fifty years, when I’m old in my bed I want to wake up when the sun shines in my window and know that the person lying beside m...
Sorry, that's unfair. Let me warn you. I want you to follow, because no matter what you think you might know, we will always be one step, three steps- seven steps ahead of you, and just when you think you're catching up, that's when we'll be right be...
Didn’t I stand there once, white-knuckled, gripping the just-lit taper, swearing I’d never go back? And hadn’t you kissed the rain from my mouth? And weren’t we gentle and awed and afraid, knowing we’d stepped from the room of desire into t...
For the longest time I was so sick I didn't have the strength or inclination to read, but looking at my books stacked up on the bedside table was comforting, like having old friends sitting in the room with me, friends who didn't require anything of ...
- A mother, a real mother with a little child, thinks day and night about the welfare of the little one in her arms. A mother knows what dangers the child will have to encounter as he grows up. She does not let the father reassure her when he makes l...
You know you're a mom when you open the door to the dishwasher mid-cycle and think, 'This is the closest I'm going to get to a spa treatment till next Mother's Day.'" "Joining the words 'Lose Weight, Effortlessly!' in the same sentence may be a form ...
Fletcher, I've been around for a long time. I've been in love too many times to count. I'd like to say it gets easier, but it doesn't. The pain you're feeling now is the pain you're going to feel again and again. The advantage of having lived through...
Pain may be the only reality but if mankind had any sense it would pursue the delusion called happiness. All the philosophers and poets who tell us that pain and suffering have a place and purpose in the cosmic order of things are welcome to them. Th...
Abominations. He did not say the last word aloud, but she felt something like pain echo through him, pity. “You sound like you know a lot about this kind of thing?” “You could say I have first hand experience.” Valdagerion was looking up at t...
Surely, our greatest parental hope is that our children attain a state of righteousness. It is the only sure road to happiness. But to attain such a state requires that they be decent as well as compliant. I know many, many young people who are not "...
For more than four hundred years we nurtured the belief (should that, perhaps, be faith?) that evidence-based investigation meeting scientific standards of rigor would reveal the true mechanism of nature. and yet when the mechanisms of nature were re...
She is a mortal danger to all men. She is beautiful without knowing it, and possesses charms that she's not even aware of. She is like a trap set by nature - a sweet perfumed rose in whose petals Cupid lurks in ambush! Anyone who has seen her smile h...
