Race doesn't exist. Skin color exists. Hair and eye color are real. Body type varies from individual to individual, as does tooth shape and color, the form of fingernails, and the amount and texture of body hair. But 'race' is a phantom conjured up b...
If kissing was a language I was sure we’d know it well. If it could measure the amount of love you felt for someone, our love was infinite after all. Even when we hugged I felt a special connection to him. It was in his loving embrace that I sought...
He read disappointment at his response and wondered if she realized that she expected a certain amount of effusive sympathy from the people she told. Rejecting that sympathy made her feel strong, compensating for what she perceived as her weakness. H...
Be game--take a chance--don't hide behind veils and veils of discretion... Go forward with what you have to say, expressing things as you see them. You are new evidence, fresh and young. Your work, the spirit of youth, you are the progress of human e...
Maybe none of this is about control. Maybe it really isn't about who can own whom, who can do what to whom and get away with it, even as far as death. Maybe it isn't about who can sit and who has to kneel or stand or lie down, legs spread open. Maybe...
Realizing that our minds control our bodies while our bodies reflect our minds amounts to understanding the most fundamental aspects of ourselves. It further equals a comprehension of the relationship between our “tools.” And since the mind and b...
Thus with continued concentration and the expenditure of enormous amounts of energy he tried to keep himself from slipping into the vast distances of his unhappiness. It was all around him. It was a darkness as impudently close as his brow. It choked...
I want you to lock an image of these falls into your mind. I want you to consider it every time you press into the Spirit.' Reece stooped and picked up a leaf lying on the platform, held it up, and pointed to a drop of dew that hung from the end. 'Th...
When a man and woman have sexual relations, who gets the most out of the deal? The man, or the woman? Since we live in a society full of tricks, the man thinks he gets more out of the encounter. But what do men really get out of it? The reality is th...
I don’t claim to know an over-arching ‘Meaning of Life,’ but I do operate under the understanding that life should not be lived under the pretense that it is simply a test propagated by an invisible, intangible, Creator-God. And it should not b...
Where had he been? Drinking, obviously. Then she started cataloging all the ways he was worthless. On fool impulse, as his most potent available argument against Lily, Bud stuck his hands into his coat pockets and pulled out the many bundles of hundr...
Thieves are not so bad, and killing wears all possible costumes. There is no death, no murder that is better than any other. If you can kill me, the manner hardly bears consideration. You want to kill your own father, and you think it will make your ...
In many cases you are not buying a product but an “identity enhancer.” Designer labels are primarily collective identities that you buy into. They are expensive and therefore “exclusive.” If everybody could buy them, they would lose their psy...
She thought of the recurrent waves of pain that for some reason or other she and her husband had had to endure; of the invisible giants hurting her boy in some unimaginable fashion; of the incalculable amount of tenderness contained in the world; of ...
No amount of soul searching would fix my past. There was no magical Band-Aid I could stick on my heart, no special glue I could use to make myself whole again. I had shattered to pieces like a fragile vase on concrete; some fragments could be roughly...
A certain amount of reverie is good, like a narcotic in discreet doses. It soothes the fever, occasionally high, of the brain at work, and produces in the mind a soft, fresh vapor that corrects the all too angular contours of pure thought, fills up t...
Though nihilism has been relentlessly criticized for overemphasizing the dark side of human experience, it might be equally true that this overemphasis represents a needed counterbalance to shallow optimism and arrogant confidence in human power. Nih...
I left my phone number on a napkin, along with trace amounts of spaghetti sauce and garlic bread grease, hoping she’d call me. And when she didn’t, I panicked and filed a missing person’s report with the police.
Flight from God always leads downward. It culminates not in the vivacious life we imagined but in what amounts only to stagnant sleep. It's why so many people seem to exist without ever really living. In fact, they really living; they're only going t...
David’s mouth dripped open slowly. He stood with his heels dug into my carpet, a dashed hope, a broken dream. No amount of money could top the priceless look that gathered on his face like an unmade bed. His eyebrows crumpled and furrowed like dish...
Sammy, wouldn’t you like to add up to something? In the future? Amount to something?” “Naw. I just figure to roll on, stackin’ days, you know, till the day I fuck up big enough the future gets canceled. Or else all planned out for me, maybe. ...
