God, but life is loneliness, despite all the opiates, despite the shrill tinsel gaiety of "parties" with no purpose, despite the false grinning faces we all wear. And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop...
My life might have been so different, had I not been known as the girl whose grandmother exploded. And had I not been born in Bad Munstereifel. If we had lived in the city -- well, I"m not saying the event would have gone unnoticed, but the fuss woul...
The way we live our lives is not sustainable. I don’t just mean recycling and turning off the faucet while brushing your teeth. I mean the way we treat each other. The way we pick and choose whose lives are important – who we actually treat as hu...
We are one knot in a great web of being, building out of the vast past and (with luck) continuing billions of years into the future, until the sun dies, the last of its energy reaches Earth, and our local light goes out. The most appropriate response...
To all those who care, You can't forever. Time steals the years, And your reflection in the mirror. But I can still see the story in your eyes, And your timeless passion that’s never died. While your skin became tired, Your heart became strong, The...
He felt safe with her. He'd never been safe with another human being, not since he'd been taken as a child from his home. He'd never been able to trust. He could never give that last small piece - all that was left of his humanity - into someone else...
It's okay to embark on writing because you think it will get you love. At least it gets you going, but it doesn't last. After a while you realize that no one cares that much. Then you find another reason: money. You can dream on that one while the bi...
At times it may seem worse - harder, at least - to live through the despair of this loss without the temporary comfort of our addictive behaviour. We cannot drown our sorrows. We must face the fact that we don’t know, really, where we are, how we g...
When it comes to loving D/ s relationships, the three little words mostly likely to have a significant , positive, and lasting impact on your partner’s well-being is probably “I love you.” Once we venture beyond that simple three-word endearmen...
Someone has to do it. It's all very well calling for eye of newt, but do you mean Common, Spotted or Great Crested? Which eye, anyway? Will tapioca do just as well? If we substitute egg white will the spell a) work b) fail or c) melt the bottom out o...
They saw her husband, this giant of a man in God’s Kingdom, this man, that for over fifteen years was their example of what a great man and husband looked like, walking up to his weeping wife, gently embracing her, soothing her, lifting and holding...
Children, only animals live entirely in the Here and Now. Only nature knows neither memory nor history. But man - let me offer you a definition - is the storytelling animal. Wherever he goes he wants to leave behind not a chaotic wake, not an empty s...
It pleases him how Spell is how the word is made but also, in the hands of the magician, how the world is changed. One letter separates Word from World, and that letter is like the number one, or an 'I', or a shaft of light between almost closed curt...
We hold further that Communism is not only desirable, but that existing societies, founded on Individualism, are inevitably impelled in the direction of Communism. The development of Individualism during the last three centuries is explained by the e...
What was the payoff? It obviously kept me in my cozy zone of being in control, being a good mother, with a good daughter. Most of all, I realize, is that it allowed me to maintain the lie that she was healed, that Nick hadn't permanently damaged her,...
I’ve been kissed by men who did a very good job. But they don’t give kissing their whole attention. They can’t. No matter how hard they try parts of their minds are on something else. Missing the last bus—or their chances of making the gal—...
Hope,... which whispered from Pandora's box after all the other plagues and sorrows had escaped, is the best and last of all things. Without it, there is only time. And time pushes at our backs like a centrifuge, forcing outward and away, until it nu...
How do we distinguish between the legitimate skepticism of those who scoffed at cold fusion, and the stifling dogma of the seventeenthcentury clergymen who, doubting Galileo's claim that the earth was not the center of the solar system, put him under...
One last mystery: on one of the little ponds, this morning, I saw wind riffling the first of the waterlily leaves. They haven’t all emerged yet, but new circles tattoo the water, here and there, a coppery red. When the wind lifted their edges, each...
Don’t you know that Orwell and Finch have a problem with insects?” snarls moody Baumauer. And, he’s right. : bedbugs. Hitchhikers. Fine purveyors of traumatic insemination. People are always itching. Itching itching itching. Twitching fingers; ...
Time is nothing, you've one breath which is like a ticking-bomb. You do not know when that breath will finish, but it's a mystery let the inevitability of the last inhalation be your strength to go one in the midst of this harsh cruel world we all li...
